a:pril 17, 1915. 
LAND AND iffiATER, 
THE WAR BY LAND. 
By HILAIRE BELLOC. 
NOTB.— ThU article has been submitted to the Press Bureau, which does not object to the publication as censored, and takes no 
responsibility for the correctness ol the statements. 
In accordance nith the requirements ot the Press Bureau, the positions o! troops on Plans illustratiug this Article must only ba 
regarded as approximate, and no definite strength at any point Is indicated. 
THE TURN OF THE TIDE IN NUxMBERS. 
THE tide in numbers has already turned 
fully upon the West. It is not far from 
turning upon the East. 
That is the explanation of the whole 
situation during the last fortnight. 
Numbers in men, numbers in material, decide 
a war in its largest aspect. Their power is par- 
ticularly clear in such a war as this, where the 
w^hole efforts of whole nations are being put forth, 
each to avoid the permanent wounding of the 
national soul. 
If this simple, but fundamental, truth, thaE 
numbers are at the root of all, had been kept in 
mind, opinion would have been less confused in 
the past than it has been. We should not have 
heard the " organising power " of the enemy 
treated as something miraculous, nor should we 
have heard exaggerated the unpreparedness of 
the Allies. 
The truth is, and has been from the beginning, 
that upon the moral side the enemy had but one 
clear advantage. In a number of his subsidiary 
guesses as to how modern war would turn out, 
particularly in his own tactical experiments, he 
was right. And this gave him, as I shall show in 
a moment, a great superiority in certain forms of 
material at the outset. But in nothing else was 
he the superior of his foes — least of all in grand 
strategy. 
His one asset — the one great thing that really 
counted — was numbers. 
Take the theories of modern war in which he 
proved right ; his power to maintain close forma- 
tion ; the effect of high explosive shell ranged by 
air- work upon permanent fortification; the use 
of heavy pieces in the field, &c., &c. The fact 
that the enemy was right in his theories on these 
things and that the Allies were, on the whole, 
wrong, gave him at once the advantage of numbers 
in the right material against his opponents. He 
had prepared an immensely larger supply of 
machine guns, a weapon closely allied to the use 
of close formation in attack. He had prepared 
a vastly superior number of heavy pieces distin- 
guished for their mobility and a vastly greater 
amount of munitioning for them. 
But it was the other element of numbers, the 
mere numbers in men, that made most difference. 
And the greater part of the self-reproach the 
Allies address to themselves for the unexpected 
but necessary trials of the opening campaign in 
the West is simply a misunderstanding of what 
must almost certainly happen when sixteen men 
are attacking ten. The business of the smaller 
number in that rude trial is not to win, for it 
cannot, but to hold out in spite of the hammering — 
that is, if time proposes to be ultimately upon their 
side. 
Now time was ultimately upon the side of the 
Allies. Britain was not a conscript countrj^ and 
her reserves of men, of potential numbers, needed 
time to appear. If time could be gained, it would 
be possible to train and equip them. The greaS 
reserve in numbers of Eussia would similarly, 
appear when sufficient time had been gained. 
Much the greatest effect of time in favour of the 
Allies was that after enough time had passed to 
aUow for the making of heavy artillery and of 
munitions therefor by the French (with their 
natural genius for this arm, and with their readi- 
ness to learn any new thing), and after the corre- 
sponding, though necessarily lesser, effort on the 
same lines, in this country, superiority would 
definitely pass from the enemy to us. 
There was a second factor in which time wasr 
going to be on the side of the Allies, if that time 
could be sufficiently extended without the enemy's 
getting, through his superiority in numbers, a 
decision. It was the factor of political attitude, 
and it appeared in all sorts of ways. The enemy 
began by being cocksure; failure was bound to 
depress him. The French in all their history have 
fought better in the latter stages of a campaign 
than in the earlier. Air-work, mainly under 
British example, everywhere advanced upon its 
moral side. It was not a superiority in material 
that ultimately gave the Allies in the West the 
preponderance they now enjoy in the air : it was 
skill and daring. 
Finally, there was one last factor which pub 
time upon the side of the AUies, and that was the 
enormous enemy wastage. 
Everything combined to swell that factor : the 
enemy's tactical tradition; his necessity for win- 
ning quickly; his use of new levies very rapidlyj 
raised; his becoming involved in a winter cam- 
paign for which he had not prepared, and which 
in places broke down his medical organisation (e.g., 
his ambulances in Poland during December). It is 
certain that when the full statistics of the fighting 
are published, we shall find that the higher 
estimates of the enemy losses have been more nearly 
accurate than the lower. And I believe that when- 
ever the end comes the comparative figures, especi- 
ally in the West, wiU surprise official opinion at' 
home. 
Had all parties to the war pursued the same 
policy in respect to the publication of numbers the 
truth I am here emphasising, that the enemyj 
wastage was, and is, startlingly greater in propor- 
tion than that of the Allies, would have stood out 
very clearly. But they do not pursue the same 
policy, and therefore the image of the truth is con- 
fused in the mind of many. 
The Germans, for instance, publish long lists 
of killed in which names appear often very late, 
and sometimes months after the casualties they 
refer to. They publish long lists of wounded which' 
certainly do not give every case — and no wonder. 
They do not publish lists of sick. They give in 
details, down to the last unit, the numbers of those 
they call their prisoners, sometimes adding the 
civilians to the soldiers, sometimes confusing the 
two categories, sometimes separating them, or men- 
tioning one only. 
