LAND AND WATER 
June 5, 1915. 
That is the Prst possible policy. 
It will iiiian that the defensive must submit 
to what is presumably a iiunierically much 
superiur lieavy artillery attack. That defensive 
is particularly weak just where the Italian offen- 
sive would do most damage. A purely defensive 
attitude of this sort would probably mean, after the 
lapse of a few weeks, the loss of the Istrian coast, 
and, though the enemy would have weakened him- 
self by no more than the figure one-half, he would 
have gained nothing ultimately by so weakening 
himself. He might almost as well haA'e sent no one 
to adopt that purely defensive attitude, for there 
is in truth no such thing in war as the unqualified 
defensive : it would be expenditure without fruit. 
One might as well have merely abandoned the 
territory thus ultimately lost. 
But such a development is exceedingly un- 
likely. It is far more probable that you will have 
one of the remaining possibilities of "the situation 
developing, and of these the next is a strong ofien- 
sive undertaken by the enemy to see whether he 
can get a decision on this new Southern front 
which will rid bim of peril there for some time to 
come. 
Well, if he does that the calculation is very 
simple. Such an attitude disposes at once of most 
of the men of any kind remaining to the enemy. 
It would be impossible for him to undertake a 
strong offensive against the Italians unless he 
were to cease simultaneously his offensive upon 
the East and to forgo any reinforcement of the 
Western line. 
But he cannot, upon the Eastern front, 
simply drop the offensive. If he does not main- 
tain it, and even maintain it at its present rate 
of expense, he must go back. The Eastern front 
is not a continuous line. It is subject to fluctua- 
tion on account of its great length, and when the 
pressure which makes it fluctuate one way ceases 
to be applied, it begins at once to fluctuate the 
other. 
The German phrase about " the Russian 
offensive being broken " is meaningless. You 
break the offensive of a man, or of an army, when 
you have hurt him so much that he cannot recover 
his strength. But though the equipment and 
munitioning of the- endless Russian reserves is 
slow, it is not non-existent, and the moment the 
Violent and expensive hammering at the Russian 
front relaxes, the tardy process of Russian 
accumulation begins to be felt again by the enemy. 
We have had at least a dozen instances of this in 
the course of the war, and we are all the more 
certain to see future ones, because the ports which 
are ice-bound in winter, though distant, are now 
open, and a certain measure of supply can reach 
our Ally from abroad. 
Suppose a third development on the Italian 
front— and quite a possible one. The enemy will 
not risk remaining weak in the West and abandon- 
ing his own offensive in the East for the sake of a 
violent and perhaps unsuccessful effort upon the 
new front. On the other hand, he dare not risk a 
purely defensive attitude there with insufficient 
men. He compromises, and sends there, as he sent 
during months into East Prussia, forces which 
keep up a sort of ding-dong alternate resistance 
and counter-offensive along the Italian front. He 
attempts no decision, but simply keeps his foe 
occupied from the Trentino to the Adriatic. Thon 
he IS occupying, perhaps, one-half of his remain- 
ing reserve of men and suffering an additional 
wastage iiionth after month, to no definite end. 
He might count, perhaps, on losing by death, 
capture, sickness, and evacuation of wounded not 
more than 100,000 men a month, but he would be 
losing that, and he would be having to supply the 
gaps at that rate, running the risk all the time of 
seeing this form of defensive break down at any 
moment, and his main Adriatic ports and arsenals 
fall into the enemy's hands. It would mean that 
he would have taken about half his reserve of 
men for this new front and that of the remain- 
ing half the drafts which he would otherwise 
have been sending in full strength East and West 
would be diminished by about 25 per cent. 
All this emphasis I give to the grave numeri- 
cal effect of Italy's coming in supposing the fight- 
ing to be confined to the Austro-Italian frontier 
alone, Italian troops not to be used upon points 
where the defensive has far less strength. (The 
Austro-Italian frontier is the strongest defensive 
line in the whole of the fighting — much stronger 
than the Carpathians, and stronger, even, than 
the Masurian border.) And it \s, further, an 
analysis which leaves out of calculation the im- 
mensely superior facilities of the Italians for 
bringing up heav\' pieces and their munitionment. 
It is, therefore, an a fortiori argument. 
It is taking the worst conditions for one's 
own side and leaving out many elements that are 
in one's favour; and the conclusion is that what- 
ever form the fighting takes upon the new fron- 
tier, the enemy, if he does not want ultimately to 
abandon his territory on this new front, will, at 
the least, suffer to the extent of one-half his 
reserve power to begin with, and about a quarter 
of the remainder, and at the most would suffer the 
expenditure of nearly all his reserve power. 
It is difficult to see any way out of this 
arithmetical conclusion : That the entry of Italy 
into the field cannot have any other than a very 
powerful effect upon the contrast in numbers 
between the Allies and the enemy at this moment, 
an effect far greater than the mere addition of a 
twelfth or thirteenth (for that is about what it 
is) might suggest— it is nearly a sixth of the 
allied force actually in the field— and an effect 
thus disproportionately great because the entry 
of these new nuvibers immediately affects the. 
enemy's small remaining reserve of man-power. 
THE RAILWAY PROBLEM ON THE 
ITALIAN FRONT. 
The war, whatever form it takes upon this 
front, will be mainly conditioned, as I said at the 
outset of this, by the contrast between the rail- 
ways upon either side of the front, and that, in 
Its turn, will mainly affect the war through the 
supply of munitions for heavy pieces. 
The Austro-Italian front is essentially a 
mountain barrier upon which, by their political 
action of half a century ago, the Austrians 
obtained the advantage— that is, the frontier 
between tlieir own territoiy and that of Italy 
commanded the exits from the mlleys of the Alps 
On account of this it would in any case be 
necessary, even if there were no such thing as 
heavy guns and no such things as railways, for 
any Italian force desiring to operate against the 
Istrian Peninsula to secure itself against an 
attack upon its communications from the north. 
