'April 17, 1915. 
LAND AND JViATEE. 
that he continues to make St. Mihiel a point of 
honour. Can he save it ? 
Of course he can. It is only a question of 
men. He has only to run a greater and a greater 
risk of having his line pierced somewhere else. 
He has only to withdraw men from Flanders, from 
the Vosges, from the Plain of Alsace, from the 
Aisne, and keep on pouring them in to hold either 
limb of the wedge which the French are thus 
imperilling. 
There is in this matter not a little misunder- 
standing due to the traditional meaning and effect 
of the word " attack." " This attack," men say, 
" will necessarily be far more expensive to us than 
the old defensive was." Or, again : " We must 
expect very great losses, for we shall be the attack- 
ing party." But under the conditions now estab- 
lished upon the Western front, those terms hardly 
apply. . The attack does not take the form of a 
number of men in the open rushing to swarm over 
a well-defended obstacle, and suffering in propor- 
tion to the difficulty of that attempt. The defeat 
of the enemy does not take the form of their having, 
after a long defence behind earth where they have 
suffered little, fallen back in order and defended 
some new position. If that were the form of the 
present fighting along the Western front the attack 
would, indeed, be enormously more expensive than 
the defence. But it is not the form. The form is 
this : 
The Allies being fairly free from enemy obser- 
vation (a freedom they owe to their established 
superiority in the air) concentrate munitions for 
their heavy guns upon a particular point; they 
then, after a certain delay for such concentration, 
deluge a narrow sector of the enemy's front with 
heav}' gun fire (in which they also have a marked 
superiority, and the accuracy of which again ' 
depends on superiority in the air). They then, 
the moment that tornado of fire ceases, rush the 
most advanced trenches of the enemy. 
Fighting of that kind does not mean that the 
attack spends more men than the defence. The 
attack spends enormously more ammunition, and 
it subjects its artillery to much more wear and 
tear, but not more than it can replace. 
The second chapter in these efforts is still less 
an example of expenditure in men by the attack. 
It consists in the rallying of the enemy in a 
counter-offensive, and in his attempt without a 
superiority in heavy guns or in air work to take 
back what he has lost, or at the worst to hold that 
part of his second or third line of trenches which 
he had preserved. And this counter-offensive is 
normally far more expensive to him than to the 
Allies whose pressure he is trying to stem. He can 
always stem it, as I have said, if he chooses to bring 
up more men; but only by losing, day after day, 
great numbers of those men over and above the 
corresponding losses of his opponent, and the men 
must come from somewhere. 
Every one of these bits of work — that at Les 
Eparges the other day; that at Eegnieville; that 
at the wood of Montmare; that at Goussainville 
— does its bit in slightly increasing the numerical 
superiority of the Allies on the line against theii 
enemy. 
At Neuve Chapelle weather and certain mis- 
calculations made the German counter-offensive 
particularly severe for the British. Nevertheless 
the total German losses were far heavier upon that 
narrow front than the total British losses. In 
the Champagne three solid weeks of tremendous 
work with something like half a million men en- 
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