March 20, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER. 
at the end of February, yet it is no exaggeration 
to estimate their total losses at more than 40,000. 
They were handling in East Prussia certainly ten, 
and, according to the latest official French esti- 
mates, fourteen array corps, and it is not to be 
believed that a force of nearly or more than half a 
million men fighting thus day after day against a 
determined enemy, tliough successful, could have 
lost less than 10 per cent. We must further add 
to the fourteen array corps v^'hich the French 
calculate to have been present together in East 
Prussia three independent divisions of cavalry. 
Lastly, the French note a further piece of evidence, 
converging towards exactly the same result — to 
wit, the emplovment of at least five German armv 
corps against them at this point, and that cer- 
tainly, for among their prisoners they they have 
discovered men belonging to that total number of 
separate corps. 
It is worthy of remark that the Guard seem 
to have suffered specially heavily, as might have 
been expected, seeing that these troops, of the best 
quality, were called in towards the end and most 
murderous part of the struggle to reinforce the 
sorely-tried German front. It is probable that 
two regiments of the Guard ceased to exist as in- 
dependent units. There is proof, for instance, 
that in one regim.cnt — the second of this famous 
body — certain units had to be dealt with as 
follows : — 
The second and the fifth companies were 
eliminated. The remains of the first, the sixth, 
and the seventh were drafted into one new com- 
pany, composed of all that was left of these three. 
Note, however, before we leave this business, 
that the whole affair was a gradual advance, very 
well contested by an enemy still determined; for 
though numerous machine guns were captured, as 
one trench after another Avas carried, not a single 
piece of field artillery was lost by the enemy, and 
after a check so serious we may legitimately regard 
that as proof of the discipline and orderly nature 
of its resistance, even to the end of the violent 
conflict. 
As to the second point, the weakening of the 
German line in the north by this action in Cham- 
pagne, and the advantage that could therefore be 
taken near La Bassee of such weakening by the 
English, we know that quite six thousjind men 
and a brigade of artillery, together with two 
batteries of lieavj- guns, came from this neighbour- 
hood down into the Champagne district to the 
reinforcement of the Germans there pressed by the 
French advance. The prisoners and the dead 
have, as we have seen, been sufficient to establish 
what unit.s they were that were thus borrowed from 
Flanders for the defence of the German position 
upon the front between Souain and Ville-sur- 
Tourbe, and the exact correspondence between the 
twenty days of French effort east of Rheims and 
the succeeding four days of British effort south of 
Lille is fully established. 
THE RATE OF WAST.VGF. 
We must not omit, in the presence of such 
news, a further reference to the rate of the enemy's 
wastage. The policy v/hich hopes to continue that 
wastage at a gi-eater pace than our own has 
already been described, but the absolute rate of 
wastage is not to be despised, for upon it will also 
depend, as well as upon the proportionate rate, 
the ultiiuate exhaustion of the enemy. 
In other words, we not only depend upon 
wearing him down faster than we wear ourselves 
down, we also depend upon wearing him down at 
at least such a pace that he shall be embarrassed 
to within some defined and limited time in the 
holding of his present positions. 
Observe that the detail of these two actions 
reported by the British and the French respec- 
tively have teen only two sections of his line, the 
one but a front of twelve miles, the other but a 
front of four, at the most, and accounted v/ithin 
a space of little over three weeks for nearly 70,000 
men, the British estimate being, after a careful 
examination of the enemy's evident losses in the 
La Bassee district from the recent action, not less 
than 17,000, and perhaps 18,000. 
Now, 70,000 men is nearly the equivalent of 
two full army corps, and the total line upon which 
this kind of thing is being carried on is not to be 
measured in sections of twelve or fourteen miles. It 
is 400 miles long in the West. It is anything from 
700 to 900 (according to its sinuosities) long in the 
East, and in the East the enemy losses have been 
further accentuated, during the winter at least, 
by the difficulties his ambulance work has experi- 
enced. It is reported (and the report has nothing 
im.pi'obable about it) that the enemy's ambulance 
work at one moment in front of Warsaw com- 
pletely broke down. In those empty plains so ill- 
provided with roads in the best weather (and 
during the recent succession of frost and thaw a 
mass of Napoleon's '" Polish rnud ") the succouring 
of the wounded must have been a task far more 
difficult of accomplishment than it was in the 
highly-organised and fully-developed West, and 
we laiow that the type of attack and the propor- 
tion of losses was not less, but more, than it has 
recently been in the West. It rather resembled the 
violent assaults upon the line of the Yser which 
marked the end of October and the middle of 
November. 
What the total rate of wastage has been from 
the Bukov/ina to the Baltic in these four months 
of incessant struggle we have no statistics to tell 
us- — not even a general guess is possible; but we 
are quite safe in saying that the proportionate 
rate has been double that in the West and the 
absolute rate treble. What more it may have been 
we cannot tell. 
Now the significance of such wastage lies in 
this. That the enemy is now really fighting for 
time as he never was at the beginning of the cam- 
paign, though our Press was too fond of record- 
ing it as the chief element then present in the 
struggle. It needs but the arrival of munitions 
and the increase of equipment for additions very 
large indeed to appear in the Russian line, and 
these additions should be coincident with the drier 
weather following upon the thaw of the spring. 
And at the same time should appear the new con- 
tingents in the West— that is, the recently trained 
younger French levy, and the much larger new 
JBritish armies. It is a sort of race between the 
advent of all these reinforcements to the Allies 
and the pace at which the wastage of the enemy is 
continued. He cannot reinforce — whatever our 
alarmist Press may say — at anything like the rate 
or to anything like the amount which the Allies 
can reinforce when once equipment and munitions 
reach the Russians, and when once our own new 
contingents are fully fitted out for service abroad. 
Every such piece of news as that from Cham- 
