September 4, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
peace or under the strain of war, I beg to insist 
upon it particularly; for it is cardinal. 
We come, then, to this : That the enemy, 
counting the boys of seventeen, the men of forty- 
five, and everything between, had a potential man- 
power at the outbreak of war of 18,000,000, 
of which, roughly, 10,000,000 are German and 
8,000,000 Austro-Hungarian. 
But this number, 18,000,000, is only a 
total theoretical maximum drawn on paper, 
satisfactory only as a piece of statistics, and, as 
will appear from another line of argument, vastly 
in excess of the real numbers available. 
THE INVARIABLE "ONE-TENTH." 
To show that this is the case, let us now 
approach these figures from quite other direc- 
tions, and we shall discover how much smaller is 
the real available total. 
The French population is not quite one-third 
of that of the enemy. France should, therefore, 
be able to produce, upon the same purely arbitrary 
and theoretical statement, not quite six million 
mobilised men. But the declaration made by the 
Ministry of War in France, which was also con- 
formable to all past and present experience, was 
that the actual number mobilised amounted to 
little more than one -tenth of the total popu- 
lation—that is, some four million men. 
When we turn to the highly illuminating 
analogy of the Balkan States in their great effort 
against Turkey, and in the supremely intense 
struggle of what may be called their succeeeding 
Civil War, we find even the proportion of 
one-tenth not quite reached. 
It is the same in whatever case you care to 
test throughout all the history of national wars. 
It is rare indeed that a community has to put 
forth the very last ounce of its available strength, 
for usually a campaign is decided before this 
effort has to be made. But when it is made — and 
there are, perhaps, a dozen leading cases in the 
past, from that of Prussia in the eighteenth cen- 
tury to that of the American Civil War in the 
nineteenth— you come to the same perpetually 
recurring figure : about, or a little under — in very 
rare cases a trifle over— one-tenth. 
RE\SONS OF THESE FURTHER 
DEDUCTIONS. 
Wherein lies the discrepancy between the 
two figures? Between the six millions, for in- 
stance, which we thus arrive at theoretically for 
modern France, and the actual rather wore thac 
four millions? And, in general, between these 
theoretical figures, however they may be arrived 
at, and the practical establishment of about, or 
less than, two-thirds of the same ? 
It proceeds from two quite different sources, 
which I beg the reader to examine closely. 
The first is the difficulty in practice — it is 
really more than a difficulty, it is an impossibility 
— of treating either the elder men or the boys 
in the same way as you treat the men really 
efficient for active service at the front. 
It is all very well to put down on paper a 
quantity of abstract units and to call thera 
" men of military age," but when you come to 
putting them to their duties, it is another matter. 
There are all sorts of wavs in which this 
difficulty appears. Suppose, for instance, after 
severe losses at a particular point a French 
general asks for rapid reinforcement. He wants 
100,000 men at least. Suppose the French Govern- 
ment were to answer this request by sending him 
50,000 boys under 18 and 50,000 men over 40. T 
am only putting the thing as an hypothesis, 
because, of course, in practice it would never be 
attempted. It would be insane. To send forces in 
which there was a certain proportion of these too 
old and too young units, these proportions skil- 
fully embedded in the whole and carefully tested 
for exceptional efficiency considering their age, 
might be reasonable. But the bodies as a whole 
would not be serviceable; they would be impos- 
sible. And that is only another way of saying that 
in practice much the greater part of your im- 
mature and of your too elderly material cannot be 
used as an immediately active part of your 
mobilised force. 
Here is another example. You mobilise all 
your available material, the immature as well as 
the elderly, and, recognising that there is in prac- 
tice this great difference in efficiency between 
thera and the really military age — the old active 
army and its reserves — ^you use the less valuable 
portions upon your communications and in garri- 
sons where they are unlikely to suffer a strain. 
Or you keep back the immature portions, uni- 
formed and equipped and stiU subject to train- 
ing; you count them as part of your forces, but 
you do not actually send them forward. But the 
forces fighting at the front need a continual re- 
plenishment, and if, when they call for recruit- 
ment, you cannot supply them with the material 
which you have nominally enrolled as soldiers, 
then you have put the nation to the expense of all 
this mobilisation and to the corresponding strain 
without an adequate result. You would have done 
far better to keep the men at call, especially the 
younger men, but not to have wasted energy upon 
keeping them as soldiers, when you could not use 
them actively as soldiers. 
In practice, therefore, a Government does not 
ever mobilise these imperfect elements to the full. 
What it does is to mobilise fully all its available 
trained men of real efficiency, to accept a propor- 
tion of older and younger volunteers who pass the 
efficiency test; to warn the younger men for ser- 
vice, and to incorporate them and to train them 
quite gradually for the later stages of a war; to 
leave tne men approaching or just over forty until 
functions where they can be really usefully em- 
ployed arise, or until the fact that the enemy is 
himself under the necessity of mobilising imper- 
fect material tempts one to face him with the cor- 
respondingly imperfect material on one's own side. 
It is even a common occurrence (as this war 
has proved) in a great national struggle for the 
elder men to be mobilised for certain duties at a 
particular moment, sent home again when the 
strain has disappeared, recalled in part later, <S:c., 
as occasion arises. 
That is the first great source of difference 
between actual figures of men mobilised in the 
course of the first year or year and a half of a 
war and the total theoretic figures of efficient 
adult males between seventeen and forty-five. 
The second source of difference accounts for 
a much greater number, and must be considered 
in detail. 
It consists in the numbers that have to ha 
