August 14, 1915. 
LAND AND JVATER, 
THE WAR BY LAND. 
By HILAIRE BELLOG. 
MOTE. — This article has been submitted to the Press Bureau, which does not object to the publication as censored, and takes no 
responsibility for the correctness of the statements. 
In accordance with the requirements of the Press Bureau, the positions of troops on Plans illustrating this Article must only be 
regarded as approximate, and no definite strength at any point is indicated. 
THE conditions under which this special 
number of Land and Water are printed 
compel me to write my notes for this 
week as early as Friday the 6th. I there- 
fore have no material upon which to base my com- 
ments later than that date. The regular date of 
Tuesday, up to the evening of which I have 
hitherto been able to use the telegrams, will be 
resumed with the next issue. 
THE POSITIOiN IN POLAND. 
It is now perfectly clear from the news of the 
last three days that the enemy cannot repose upon 
the Vistula line for some little time to come, nor 
abandon his still undecided Eastern offensive. He 
must go on. 
The real point of interest, therefore, to those 
who concern themselves with the strategy alone 
of this campaign, is not the occupation of Warsaw 
(important as the political consequences of this 
may be), but the relative exhaustion of the two 
parties to the still undecided struggle in Poland. 
There are subsidiary points of interest which 
cannot indeed be neglected and upon which I 
shall touch at the conc'lusion of my notes. The 
threat — exaggerated, I think, by most critics — to 
the northernmost of the great Russian railways 
from the action of Von Biielow in Courland : the 
admirable and unexpected success which our Ally 
appears to have achieved in the complete evacua- 
tion of the threatened points upon the Vistula 
(the difficulty of this last operation will be appre- 
ciated by all competent opinion, and full success 
in such a task cannot be rated too highly, either 
as a test of the condition of an army or as a proof 
that it holds its enemy at will) : the very slow and 
costly progress north of Cholm and south of the 
Narev — all these points have their importance and 
must be dealt with. But our judgment of none of 
them c-ompares in importance with our arriving at 
some just though rough estimate of the losses and 
consequent exhaustion upon the two sides. 
Remember what this campaign upon the 
Eastern front meant and means to the enemy. 
When towards the end of April he had accu- 
mulated his great mass of shell and brought out 
his great numbers of winter-trained reserve, when 
he knew that the approaching summer would 
almost see the end of his power to maintain full 
numbers, and the succeeding autumn or winter the 
decline of those numbers, the enemy deliberately 
staked his future upon crushing Russia. He left 
upon the West the bare minimum of numbers 
necessary to hold that now trebly-fortified line, 
and he concentrated the whole of his available 
energy, Austrian and German, to the attainment 
of victory in Poland. 
Now, what is victory ? 
It does not consist in advancing; it does not" 
consist in the occupation of territory, nor in the 
recovery of towns. It consists in the disarming of 
your armed foe. 
Whether you achieve this by making him lose 
steadily a much larger percentage of men, 
weapons, and missiles than you yourself lose in 
the process — until at last he shall be completely, 
exhausted long before you are — or whether you 
achieve it by making a very large proportion of 
his men, or all of them, surrender on finding 
themselves surrounded ; or whether you achieve it 
by scattering his forces and breaking up their 
cohesion so that they turn from an organised ma.s3 
into mere dust, the end, and the definition of that 
end, are always the same. Victory is to be 
measured by the disarming of your enemy in a 
larger proportion than you are yourself disarmed 
in the process. 
Judged by that test, how near to success has 
the enemy come after his three and a half months 
of prodigious warfare in the East ? 
German criticism, as a whole, particularly the / 
ablest and most sober, now envisages the chances 
of victory in Poland in terms of attrition. It 
seems not only too late in the season to arrive at 
a decision, but also it is appreciated that what 
the overwhelming shock of May failed to do the 
tortoise movements of August certainly cannot 
accomplish. The Russian armies were not 
separated during the course of the Galician re- 
treat. The attempt to turn them by the north 
(above Jaroslav) in the middle of May utterly 
failed. It will hardly succeed now that the very 
fullest warning has been given to the Russians, 
and the longest experience by them of the gradu- 
ally decreasing enemy offensive has been obtained. 
But it is maintained or hoped in Berlin that 
the mere losses in men and weapons which Russia 
has sustained during this great retreat leaves her 
in a position from wliich she cannot recover to the 
point of taking the offensive again. 
There is such a thing as destroying your 
enemy merely by this process of gradually weaken- 
ing him in men and material, particularly if the 
replacing of that material within any useful time 
be forbidden him. The arrivaiat such a result 
is what the enemy thinks possible. It is on this 
account that he lias got himself so far involved 
that he 'is compelled to continue his action in the 
East, and can now hardly fall back to the defen- 
sive there or feel himself free to act at once else- 
where. 
He has undertaken a task into which he baa 
thrust himself so far that he must complete it or 
fail. 
Slight as are the points of evidence upon 
which to base a judgment, we shall not under- 
