LAND AND WATER 
Tebruary 13, 1915. 
■ command of units, as distinguished from those em- 
' ployed Ix'hiad the army and upon the staffs. 
Well, the action of the new formations which 
Germany proposes to bring into the field has always 
threat<>ned the Allies with its superior efficiency on 
this very score. The enemy has told us that though 
we could raise in the case of Russia and of England 
very large new formations limited in amount rather 
by the slowness of equipment than by the lack of 
recruits, our great difficulty would be the provision 
of a sufficient body of officers. As against the 
orlf^inal force which the enemy put into the field 
canct with which he proposed to A\'in a short and 
decisive campaign that prediction was sound.^ It 
will hardly apply to his new formations now. There 
is, indeed, a carefully arranged system whereby 
reserve oflicers of more or less training are prepared 
for such formations, but their value cannot be com- 
pared naturally with the professional soldiers who 
are now permanently out of the field. 
It would be very foolish to exaggerate this 
element in the situation, but it is not one to be 
neglected. What would perhaps be still more 
interesting and what unfortunately we have not 
been told is the rate of loss among the non- 
commissioned officers of the German service. For 
the German service differs from others, particularly 
from the French, in the way in which these men 
are obtained. They are as a body distinct in age 
and in outlook from the mass of those whom they 
command. They are older, they are professional 
soldiers, they are picked for character and to some 
extent for social position. They furnish later the 
lower elements of that highly developed bureau- 
cratic system, which the modern German Empire 
has established to the admiration of certain of its 
enemies, to the disgust of others. At any rate 
the new formations are still more difficult to 
imagine lacking this element than lacking their 
proper element of professional officers. For with 
all the militaiy excellences attached to the service 
of our enemies elasticity and initiative in the lower 
ranks are not among them. One may say without 
either exaggeration or the fear of that detestable 
error which consists in belittling one's oijponent 
that the Germans could not improvise armies as 
Great Britain is doing to-day, or that they would 
maintain an improvement inider the strain of war 
such as the French service has maintained. It 
is the corollary of their full prevision, with 
its prepared equipment and all the rest, that 
the duration of the war beyond its expected limit 
and the wearing down of the original military 
framework upon which it depended tells more 
severely in the German case than in ours. The 
last conclusion connected with this calculation of 
wastage is the chief one ; and that is, that progress- 
ing as it does at a greater rate than that of their 
opponents, the numerical superiority of the central 
powers — which they still retain by a precarious 
margin — will, if they cannot effect a decision within 
the next few weeks, disappear altogether, and that 
the gradual equipment of the Russians and of the 
new British contingents will at least dip the scale 
against them. And we have yet to see how they 
will meet a campaign under the conditions of 
numerical inferiority ; for we must remember that 
the whole scheme of German strategic and tactical 
traditions is based upon a certitude of numerical 
superiority against the enemy, as is their treatment 
of permanent fortifications and every other product 
of their military mind. 
A FURTHER ECONOMIC POINT. 
THESE notes dealt last week with the 
elements of one side of the economic fac- 
tor in war — the real effect of a metal re- 
serve, and of the instruments of credit 
based upon it to a nation fighting for its 
life, and it was attempted to be shown that the im- 
portxincc of such a reserve and the instruments 
based upon it was very greatly exaggerated by such 
financiers as have come to consider the mere 
economic effort almost entirely in terms of the 
mere medium of exchange. It was attempted to 
be shown that, save in a doubtful case of certain 
foreign supplies, our enemies would be able to con- 
tinue the war even under the strain of an increas- 
ingly adverse exchange. While for internal effort 
they were free even if their currency should break 
down altogether— of which, by the way, there is no 
likelihood or sign. 
Perhaps it may be advisable in the lack of 
general news this week to turn to another aspect 
of the economic question, which is the strain im- 
posed upon the Allies by their present rate of ex- 
penditure. It is a question which has come to the 
front lately through the meeting of the various 
Parliamentarians nominally responsible for 
finance in the various allied Governments. The 
economic strain imposed upon a nation by its ex- 
penditure of material during a fjreat war 'is not to 
he measured in terms of the strain imposed upon 
%ts exchequer. 
What the public authorities are spending is 
indeed some guide to the real strain. It bears a 
certain relation to it. But it is neither parallel 
nor equivalent to it, and one nation, spending 
apparentl}- far more than another equally wealthy, 
may in reality be under a far less severe economic 
strain. To appreciate this, let us examine what it 
is that a nation consumes of its wealth under the 
effect of a great war. A great war consumes or 
lessens the wealth of a nation in two ways — direct 
and indirect. It consumes the wealth of the nation 
directly by the destruction of existing v/ealth, 
whether when the enemy destroys such existing 
wealth or when the military authorities of the 
nation itself destroy such existing wealth for 
military reasons. Indirectly a great war lessens 
the potential wealth of a country, or lessens its 
wealth production for a considerable space of time 
because it puts the economic energies of the nation 
to the production of things not useful in normal 
times, and therefore not usable in consumption 
save during the period of war; it further re- 
duces the economic power of a nation by taking 
men from the manufacture of things which will 
help to produce further wealth and putting them 
to the manufacture of things which, once con- 
sumed, produce no further wealth ; finally, it dis- 
locates the normal machinery of production, and 
leaves many producers without a demand for their 
wares. 
All that expenditure upon the part of the 
national exchequer which is effected under the 
headings of the nourishment, the billeting, and the 
paying of troops, the paying for service other than 
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