L A N 1) A N D WATER 
September 4, 1915. 
drawn off 
,n on froir. active service and relu.'^d to the 
generals at tl,e front Ix^eause they are required 
S p^duce not only nuuntions of war but the 
npc^rities of the national life as a whole. To 
tl^ most deputed and essenti.l elen^ent ,n our 
analysis 1 will now turn. 
DEDUCTIONS FOR INTFRNAL I ABOUR. 
It is clear that an armv in the field must be 
"ontinuallv supplied with nniniiions, renewed 
;quipment. and food. It n,ust also have ready 
for i means of immediate transport from point to 
point, and it must evacuate its wounded and re- 
vive recruitment. All this means that a vast 
Quantity of men must be used to work the trans- 
port sei-vice provision over and above the main- 
tenance of the civilian popuhUion 
When we are told that old figures, rules ot 
thumb, laid down in past wars to determine this 
proportion of men, are too large and should not 
be applied to the present war on account ot 
'• modern efficiency of organisation," we reply 
that the exact opposite is the case. Modern 
methods absorb not less but many more men tor 
transport alone, because transport is mechanical. 
They further absorb better trained, stronger, and 
more efficient men. 
It is true, for instance, that the railway 
moves vastly more men and moves them quicker 
than anv older form of transport, but it is also 
true that the railway means much more capital 
and current expenses per man served, and that 
is only another way of saying that it needs far 
more 'human labour in proportion to the units 
that it feeds, evacuates and moves. Behind the 
men actually working on a railway are the men 
repairing and constructing rolling stock and 
machines, the men mining coal and iron, and the 
men transporting the raw material for such stock. 
There is not only transport, there is pro- 
vision. It absorbs not a less but a much larger 
proportion of men than it did in an older time. 
You want perhaps four times the human labour 
to make a modern field piece that was required 
to make the old smooth bore, and you want much 
more men to make a thousand shells and fuses for 
a 75 than you wanted for making a thousand of 
the old 12-pound round shot. 
Finally, you need an enormously greater 
number of munitions; not ten or twenty times 
as much, but a hundred times as much. 
It is the same all down the scale. You want 
more labour to make the rifles and you want to 
make more rifles, and you have a vastly greater 
complexity of machinery, new instruments, new 
chemicals, even new arms, such as the aircraft. 
In other words, the old coefficients, the figures 
that were used as rules of thumb by the higher 
command of past generations to ascertain how 
many men behind the front one needed to keep 
the front going, are not diminished, but increased 
under the conditions of modern warfare. 
It is, therefore, great nonsense to talk as 
though the numbers thus withdrawn from the 
fighting line could not be calculated, and as 
though the experts giving those numbers were 
engaged in worthless guesswork. 
It is true that we cannot fix a maximum; we 
do not know how many more men than the old 
proportion may not have been taken first and last 
for thus supplying the enemy's forces, but we do 
know that the proportion niust be much higher 
than it used to be. and that if we take the did 
figures as a mini in inn ire are uell within the mark. 
To these men necessary for the maintenance 
of the Army wc add. of course, those nccessaiy to 
maintain the nation as a whole. 
Now, it must occur to every reader of such a 
statement, however lately he may have become 
interested in military affairs, that there is 
here no exact correspondence between the 
mere numbers of men and women required 
thus to " run the nation and the Array " 
during a war and the number of mUiUrr\^ 
efficients withdrawn for that purpose. It is mani- 
fest that a great part of the work — ^much the most 
of it— can be done bv men who would be unable 
to serve in the ranks", some of it even by women. 
The idea that prisoners of war can materially 
lighten the task even in such vast niunbers as 
those taken in the })resent campaign is, indeed, 
erroneous, as we find from the work actually set 
these prisoners, which has u.sually but little rela- 
tion to the conduct of the campaign. Still, it is 
clear that much the greater proportion of this 
auxiliary work will not fall upon national 
militarily eflicients. 
But the point to remember is that a certain 
proportion does necessarily and inevitably fall 
upon men of this type. 
This is true of all the harder forms of work 
in munition-making and in the construction of 
equipment; it is true of all expert work, artisan 
and professional, where the man, however phy- 
sically efficient, is of far more service behind the 
lines than at the front. It is true of most mining, 
most construction, and. in general, it applies par- 
ticularly to the more modern services. Agriculture, 
which has always been a preoccupation in 
national war, can be conducted with very few 
military efficients, but mining cannot, the harder 
work of transport cannot, nor can the artisan 
work required upon the million of complex, 
mechanical matters peculiar to modern war. 
Now, we know from the past what such de- 
ductions have had to be in all previous wars, and 
we know from the experience of the Allies what 
the minimum at least of such withdrawals comes 
to in this war, and it is vain to imagine that the 
enemy is here in a better posture than ourselves. 
Here, if anywhere, we have had sharp experi- 
ence of how rapidly the margin of available men 
is reached. It is true that we haA'e also to main- 
tain a great export trade, and that, in the absence 
of Conscription, exact figures are not available. 
But we know the difficulty with munitions; we 
know the results upon mining, and we have before 
us the example of France, which has, under the 
strain of the war, actually been compelled to recall 
men originally mobilised. 
It is these two factors, then, the actual in- 
efficiency of the too old and the too j'oung 
nominally set down for service, and, much more 
important, the deductions necessary for auxiliary 
work, which everywhere reduce the theoretic 
figures by not far short of a third, and forbid a 
modern nation to put into the field much more 
than ten per cent, of its total population. 
So surely as of the French 39 m.illion popula- 
tion a theoretic six million became in practice only- 
just over four million, the Bulgarian 650,000 
soldiers in practice under 400.000, so surely has 
the experience of every national war invari- 
ably brought us to this figure of one-tenth 
or barely more than a tenth, of the total popula- 
