June 12, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER. 
the field nearly two men, with another two behind 
them ready for training as the war proceeded. 
Their superiority in gans was upon the same 
scale. llussia, they calculated, would put 
into the field, during these first v/eeks of 
war, when France was being defeated, only 
so many as could be checked without too greit 
an effort upon the Eastern frontier, and 
held until the destruction of the French army was 
completed. But, as I have remarked above, the 
enemy's confidence reposed not only in his numeri- 
cal superiority, coupled with the peculiar \Tilner- 
ability of France upon the West, and the peculiar 
tardiness of Russian concentration upon the East, 
but also upon certain calculations peculiar to his 
own theories of war, and what those were will be 
examined in the next number of this journal. 
It will be seen that the enem.y's theory of the 
coming war was not, as an unbalanced and very 
hasty journalistic judgment in this country con- 
ceives, a marvel of preparation, of organisation, 
and of decision, but what one might expect after 
so many years of peace, and what was discover- 
able in the military opinions of every other service 
in Europe, a mixture of wisdom and unwisdom, 
a patchwork of guesses which proved in some 
things exact; in others muddled; in others, again, 
merely disastrous errors. ' 
I shall turn to an examination of those 
theories with the more interest when I resume 
this analysis next week, from the fact, to which 
allusion has already been made, that in this 
country alone among all the Allies there has been 
conducted, during the last few days, a very 
vigorous, but quite uninstructed, effort to amaze 
public opinion by an over-praise of the enemy, 
and by the representation of his strength as some- 
thing, both in scale and in quality, different from 
the strength of those v/hose approaching task in 
the West it is to break his backbone and to have 
done with his influence in Europe. 
H. BELLOC. 
{To he continued.) 
THE WAR BY WATER. 
Bv A. H. POLLEN, 
NOTE Tliis article bas been subaiitted to the Press Bureau, which docs not object to the publicatiaa as cecsored, aod takes a* 
responsibility for the correctness o( the statements. 
THE DARDANELLES. 
FROM the Dardanelles we have this week 
tv.-o exceedingly important pieces of 
news. A German steamer employed as 
a transport by the Turks has been sunk 
by an unnamed British submarine, and in the 
operations of the 3rd and 4th of June the British 
forces co-operated with the land forces, as on all 
previous occasions v/here such co-operation was 
possible. These tv/o facts are significant as show- 
ing that our submarine attack on the Turkish 
communications is continuously maintained, and 
that the German submarine attacks on our ships 
have not in any way whatever interfered with 
the normal course of our operations. 
There are, it seems, only two Germ-an 
steamers of considerable tonnage known to be in 
the Sea of Marmara or at Constantinople, and 
as one of these — the General — is accounted for, 
the ship that is lost must be the Corcovado, a 
North Germ.an Lloyd boat of 8,000 tons burden. 
She was apparently plying as a sort of ferry 
between the Asiatic and the European shores of 
the Dardanelles. On the Asiatic side the Turks 
have the benefit of railway communications, and, 
if the Dardanelles can be ferried, Constantinople 
is in close touch with the front. But if the ferry 
is made unsafe, and transports cannot ply 
direct across the Sea of Marmara, then there is 
no alternative channel of communication to the 
long overland route which is entirely without rail- 
ways, and the roads of which are reputed extra- 
ordinarily bad. Moreover, the road leads over the 
Isthmus of Bulair, where the convoys would be 
singularly exposed to attacks from the Allies. 
This being so, so long as we can maintain our 
submarines in the eastern section of the Dar- 
danelles and in the Sea of Marmara, so long shall 
we put the enemy forces in the Peninsula of 
jGallipoli into an exceedingly unenviable position. 
The direct military value, therefore, of thes© 
submarine enterprises can hardly be exag- 
gerated. But there seems good reason for sup- 
posing that the m.oral value can scarcely be less, 
it has always been very doubtful if the majority 
of the inhabitants of Constantinople are in sym- 
pathy with Enver Pasha and those who have 
brought the Ottoman Empire under the heel of 
Berlin. The appearance of E14 almost at the 
quays of Constantinople itself is credibly reported 
to have caused a brief but really serious panic. 
Several transports have been lost already, and 
now by far the largest the Turks could command 
is gone. The moral value of this action is in- 
creased by the fact that we have already lost one 
submarine in the Sea of Marmara in circum- 
stances not yet disclosed to us, if indeed they are 
officially known, and another in the Dardanelles. 
I'ersistence with the submarine campaign in face 
of these losses may well impress the Turks quite 
as much as our persistence in using the ships to 
bombard them in the peninsula, despite the suc- 
cesses of the Germ.an IT boats. 
And, in the meantime, the German U boats 
have no more successes to their credit. And for 
this we can probably thank the activity of our 
scouting craft and the thoroughness with which 
all possible Germ.an submarine bases are being 
searched out and shelled. Each side, indeed, is 
faced with peculiar difliculties in this curious 
underwater war. To get into the Sea of Marmara 
at all, our submarines have to pass the Narrows 
and then to travel between twenty and thirty, 
miles of tlie Dardanelles before they reach hostile 
and land-locked waters, where no supplies or help 
can possibly reach them. The bottle-neck, through 
which they enter the narrow channel that leads 
to the field of their vrork, is heavily mined below 
the surface. It is by this time no new experience 
for submarines to thread their way through minQ>« 
?• 
