March 27, 1915. 
LAND AND .\Y A T E K. 
In the French formula " the enemy, having 
been drawn to put forth the maximujn of his effort 
before your ov,n maximum of effort against him is 
reached, the growth of your effort to a maximum 
shall correspond with the decline of his." 
It is the only principle upon which forces in- 
ferior at first in number and in munitioning can 
make for ultimate victory. 
It must, therefore, whether after such a sharp 
local success as Neuve Chapelle the other day, or 
after a sharp local reverse such as that of Soissons 
some months ago, be perpetually repeated that 
what counts (supposing discipline and all moral to 
remain unaffected) is not the local defence or re- 
tirement, but the proportion of total losses even 
at Soissons, where against a single depleted French 
Division certainly two, and possibly three, corps 
converged, and where reinforcements failed 
through the breakdown of the bridges in the flood 
of the Aisne, the enemy lost about three men to 
the French two. A French body of about 14,000 
men beyond the Aisne lost in killed and wounded, 
and in prisoners, half its effectives. The blow was 
severe, the enemy advanced over an area almost 
exactly equal to that seized by the British a fort- 
night ago at Neuve Chapelle. But the enemy 
gained this local success at an expense of not less 
than 12,000 men. That is the estimate of men 
who were not engaged in influencing public 
opinion, but surveying as eye-witnesses the nature 
of the action : of men who saw the dense German 
masses swarming down the valley to Conchy at its 
narrow mouth, and who saw the play of the 75'3 
upon those masses from the spur above Soissons 
which was ultimately abandoned. 
At Neuve Chai^elle, tacitly and locally a suc- 
cess, you have the same principle at work as at 
Soissons, which was tacitly and locally a defeat, 
save that at Neuve Chapelle the proportionato 
enemy losses were more than three to two — more 
nearly two to one. 
The enemy has told us that Sir John French's 
estimate of 17,000 to 18,000 losses upon the Ger- 
man side is ridiculous, and that the real losses were 
more like a third of that amount. 
Let us digress a moment to analyse that 
statement. 
THE GERMAN COMMUNIQUE ABOUT 
NEUVE CHAPELLE. 
The advance at Neuve Chapelle was made 
against a front of over 4,000 yards and covered 
a depth nearly a mile wide at its maximum, I 
believe, or possibly a trifle more. The total area 
rushed was, I suppose, nearly two square miles 
in extent, and the succeeding lines of trenches 
occupied were not far short of tv/o and a half 
miles long. Let us suppose that this front were 
at first being held by so small a number as 6,000 
men. The calculation is a very rough and con- 
fused one, of course, because a defensive front is 
not held by one fixed number of men, who are 
rooted there like trees, but by a minimum 
actually on the spot always, with considerable 
reinforcements available in a comparatively short 
time, whenever serious pressure develops upon 
them. 
The troops on the spot upon that Wednes- 
day morning were taken completely by surprise. 
For thirty-five minutes they were in as bad a 
storm of heavy shell as has fallen on anyone in the 
campaign, except possibly at one moment near 
Perthes three weeks ago. A further belt of shell- 
ing immediately behind them forbade retirement, 
even in disorderly groups. The moment the 
shelling ceased, the British concentration was upon 
them. Of prisoners taken, apart from all other 
casualties, you have some 2,000, and under a 
shelling from which there was no escape you 
have the greater bulk of the men who were 
holding this first line of trenches. 
Next following upon this completely success- 
ful stroke of the Wednesday morning, you have 
three successive days, if I am not mistaken, of 
attempts to retake the positions lost. There is 
here no question of surprise; the enemy is not 
able to concentrate, unwatched, as the British, 
either from weather conditions or from the polity 
of the enemy's air work, we believe concentrated 
unwatched, before the main action. The Ger- 
mans' counter - offensive is expected and taken 
for granted. It is met as every such expected 
attack can be met. It is poured in from 
reinforcements and still further reinforcements 
and is regularly and methodically repelled. 
That means upon the face of it continuous 
heavy losses, necessarily exceeding those of 
the defensive, and particularly exceeding them 
in the case of troops who come on, as we know, 
as the enemy does in this campaign. 
.We know what the losses were upon the 
successful side in the first surprise attack and in 
the defensive work which succeeded it, and it; 
lasted, I understand, for three days. The enemyj 
asks us, in his statement of his own losses, to 
accept for these losses a figure only two-thirds 
that of our own. That is nonsense, and does not 
even, as has often been the case in the past with 
the enemy's figures, accomplish misguidance. 
No one will believe it. If the enemy had 
said : " Our losses were not 18,000, as you 
imagine, but very little more than 12,000," the 
statement would have had its due effect, and 
w^ould have had weight with that kind of man 
who always tends to react against every confi- 
dence; but when he says that his losses were not 
6,000, there is nothing doing. 
Those who are interested in this point may 
further note a very characteristic detail. Soma 
weeks ago the French published their estimate 
of the German losses on the Perthes front. The 
Germans issued a statement in which they used 
the very same phrase that the losses were " not 
a third of the French estimate." 
In conclusion, it must be reiterated that the 
devices of this sort for misleading an enemy aro 
perfectly legitimate, and that the enemy's mis- 
statements of this kind are no more unworthy 
than the calculated reticence which is so striking 
a feature of the Allied accounts; but there is 
apparent in this German work exactly what you 
get in the great bulk of German historical work 
and textual criticism — to wit, the sharp contrast 
between painstaking and bad judgment. Tha 
enemy, as a general rule (and particularly in the 
early" stages of the campaign), gives us very 
careful statements of acceptable detail. He some- 
times gives us false statements carefully thought 
out, for the sake of producing effects which may 
reasonably be expected — e.g., when he tells tise 
public at home that Scarborough is a fortified 
port, or that London, having been in fear of 
Zeppelins (which it is), was hiding in cellar.s 
(which it was not). He has also often given us, and 
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