LAND A N D W A T E R. 
^larcli 20, 1915. 
ployed beliiutl that line, upon the chance of using 
them later. 
2. He requires for the holding of the line 
A considerable force on account of his militarv 
t]'adition and of his school of war. The type of 
discipline which promotes and enforces close 
formation in attack, and which reduces to its 
lowest value individual initiative in the soldier, 
has great merits in war, as this campaign has 
proved; but it has certain inevitable defects, one 
of which is that you must always pack your men, 
e\en wlien you are defending. 
3. The allied air work and the allied grow- 
ing supply of heavy pieces and their nuinition 
combined' has given their heavy artillery clear 
superiority in the West over that of the enemy. 
4. It is accepted that the sanitary condition 
of the enemy is in the West gravely inferior at 
tills moment to our own. I do not bring forward 
the evidence for this ; I only state it as it has been 
told to me, and J lielieve it to be a true statement 
upon the evidence I have heard. 
Now, put all this together, and observe what 
follows upon it if the policy of " attrition " is con- 
ducted in a certain manner. 
Suppose upon a particular section of the 
front, such as that in the Champagne district, the 
light chalk upland, some twenty to forty miles 
east of Eheims, you order for a certain short 
period an attack to be delivered on the German 
lines. You are not intended to break through. 
You may break through by a bit of luck, but that 
. is not your main object. Your main object is only, 
for the moment, to make the enemy in this field 
lose more men than you are about to expend. 
In the first place, your assault is backed by 
heavy artillery far superior to his own. He loses 
heavily from that. 
In the second place, it is so important for 
him to preserve his line (where, by definition, he is 
upon the defensive) that he will mass men in very 
considerable numbers against you so as to be cer- 
tain of ensuring his line against breaking. 
In the third place, he can only obtain men by 
borrowing all up and down the line. He cannot 
borrow from a large reserve, for by definition he 
has not got a reserve. His whole plan excludes 
it. He can only get the greater part, at least, of 
his reinforcements by sending for units to all sorts 
of places between the Swiss mountains and the 
East. It takes him some time to effect that con- 
centration, and until he has effected it he will not 
admit a counter offensive, because all the tra- 
ditions of his service forbid this until he has 
secured a considerable superiority of number. 
In the fourth place, when he has so concen- 
trated a very great number against your develop- 
ing attack, he will, by his consistently dense 
formation when he takes the counter offensive, 
lose more heavily than you in your open order. 
In the fifth place, the superiority of the allied 
field artillery will particularly try him during 
such rushes, and that superiority is amply 
assured. 
Finally, not only does he thus lose very 
heavily in maintaining his ground, first by a pre- 
carious defence, and afterwards by a dense 
counter ofiensive in the section where the first 
attack was delivered, but the other sections from 
which he has borrowed are all more or less 
n-eakened. Some one or more of them will be more 
weakened than the rest, and the chances are that 
these local weaknesses will be discovered and 
taken advantage of. Tlie allies in that distant 
section will deliver an attack ultimately depend- 
ing on, and produced by, the main attack far 
away, and if the vveakness of the enemy at the 
])oint of this secondary attack has been pushed too 
i'ar he will run the risk of heavy local losses 
there. 
Now apply this to the two sections — the 
main one in Champagne, the secondary one 
at La Bassee, and the plan of " attrition " becomes 
clear in that excellent double model. 
In the first place, it becomes clear that the 
great action in Champagne brought down the 
enemy's numbers there by a prodigious amount, 
probably not less than 50,000 men. 
And in the second place, it becomes equally, 
clear that this action in Champagne drew men 
from the north, and precisely from that region 
where at the very moment that the action of 
Champagne ceased the British offensive was taken 
round Neuve Chapelle, just north of La Bassee. 
As to the first point, we have the elements 
for an exact calculation. 
The full French account, as published for 
official information in France, gives us a very 
accurate list of the forces which the Germans 
brought up upon this front, and we have further 
information, to some extent, from the same 
source, of the points from which the German rein- 
forcements were drawn when the French attack 
began on the 16th February. The Germans had 
here 119 battalions, 31 squadrons, and 64 field bat- 
teries, 20 batteries of heavy guns. In the chief 
effort, the three weeks that the main action lasted, 
they further brought up twenty more battalions 
of caA'alry, six of which were of the Guards, two 
more batteries of heavy guns, also of the Guards, 
and a whole regiment oi field artillery — not less 
than the equivalent of a full army corps. 
The total number of men of every arm con- 
centrated upon this narrow front in the course of 
this devastating piece of fighting was not less than 
200,000, and probably as much as 220,000 men, 
and of those, certainly one-fifth— probably nearly 
a quarter — were to be found in the casualty lists 
before the achievement of the French purpose. 
For if 10,000 dead w-ere accounted for, as they, 
were within the zone which the French could per- 
sonally survey and tabulate, you have not less than 
12,000 at the very least over the whole action, and 
it is not credible, even in violent and close fighting 
of this kind, that the proportion of wounded to 
dead was much less than 3 to'l. It would be very 
astonishing if it were any less — that is, excluding 
unwounded prisoners. 
As to the districts from which the Germans 
hurriedly drew their reinforcements when the 
front in question was beginning to be pressed in, 
the French have been able to identify at least sioj 
batteries of field artillery, six battalions of the 
Guard, and two heavy batteries of the Guard as 
having come from the district in front of tho. 
British trenches in the North. 
There is another way in which we can esti- 
mate what the German losses were upon this 
front. The Germans have informed us (and one 
sees no particular reason to believe that the infor- 
mation is inaccurate when it tells against them) 
that the losses in Champagne in those days ex- 
ceeded the German losses during the recent heavy, 
fighting along the East Prussian frontier. Now, 
though the Germans Avere successful in that fight- 
ing in the East until their reverse before Pzrasnyz 
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