Lyc^^mi^'- 1 
^•J-^J- 
main fronts where alone liis late can be. 
decided. 
(2) Do not modern aids, especially the niacliine 
gun, enable a front to be held with such few men 
that the wastage hitherto suffered, or likely to be 
suffered for a very long time, can have no effect 
upon the strength of the fronts held by the enemy ? 
The power of the modern defensive has proved 
far greater than was expected before this war. 
But it is still subject to certain clear limitations 
of number. After a certain maximum of machine 
guns any addition of these weapons ceases to 
strengthen a line. That maximum has long ago 
been reached by both French and Germans upon 
'the Western front. The minimum required to hold 
a line in normal country — that is, where there are 
no formidable obstacles of marsh or mountain — 
has long beien settled in practice by the present 
camj^aign, and the classical instance is the German 
line in the West. This line is somewhat over 500 
miles in length. It can be held with somewhat 
less than 4,000 men a mile — but it has never been 
found possible to hold it with much less than 4,000 
men a mile. By this one does not mean that 
each sector of, say, 50 miles must always be lined 
with say 180,000 men. Men are concentrated in 
threatened spots and spread out much more thinly 
in sectors not threatened. They exist in the 
shape not only of men in the Front but reserves 
behind it, etc. But the average of all told on such 
a line can never fall to as low as say 3,000 men a 
mile without peril, and the enemy, with every 
incentive to keeping his defensive down to a 
minimum in the West has never found it possible 
to hold that line of 500 miles securely without many 
more than one million and a half men. 
The conception that modern methods render 
a line tenable by lesser and lesser numbers is quite 
unscientific. There is with any type of weapon a 
mininnmi number re<|uired for a given length of 
line, tuid if that minimum is passed the line is in 
peril. If it is still further passed the line cannot 
be held, and the front must either be shortened or 
break. 
. (3) Do we not overestimate the enemy's 
w-astage considering the much smaller numbers 
issued officially by the Germans ; and do we 
not overestimate its effect considering his state- 
inent that nearly go per cent, of his wounded return 
to the firing line, and considering the new recruit- 
ment he can get from the Turks, as also the addi- 
tion of the Bulgarians who have recently joined 
him. 
The general estimates of the enemy's wastage 
rely upon many lines of calculation of which the 
ofiicially published casualties are only one. All 
these lines converge to much the same results. 
.\ccorcHng to these the two central Empires had 
lost Old of llic field— not available— by the end of 
1915 something over six million men. To this must 
now be added a certain Bulgarian and a con- 
siderable Turkish wastage as well. These lines 
of calculation are familiar to my readers, but it is 
worth repeating the initial point that they are 
independent lines. They consist in the analogy 
of known Allied losses in proportion to the forces 
engaged ; in the known proportion of total losses 
to dead ; in the known proportion of the Austro- 
Hungarian man-power to the (ierman man-power ; 
in the known facts with regard to the calling up of 
young classes and of elderly classes ; in the known 
results obtained from an analysis of the prisoners 
captured, etc. 
The estimates do not, of course, exactly agree. 
They \'ary from a certain minimum to a certain 
maximum. The lowest minimum estimate would 
give somewhat imder six million. The liighest 
maximum estimate nearer seven million. But no 
estimate could possibly give a result as low as, 
say, five million. 
Take, for instance, the estimate of Colonel 
Feyler, a Swiss and a neutral who carries perhaps 
the highest authority in Europe in these matters, 
and who has consistently favoured the lowest 
possible estimate of enemy losses. His calculation 
of 200,000 men a month for the German Empire 
alone as net loss gives us for the enemy as a whole 
at least 350,000 a month, which, at 16 months, 
gives us 5,600,000, to which should })roperly be 
added the margin of temporary losses not returned 
to service at the moment of calculation. // wc 
took the German casualiv lists alone and allowed 
for sick we should not reduce this low estimate by as 
much as one- fifth. 
But the German official casualty lists cannot 
be accepted alone as sufficient evidence. They 
are misleading unless they are read rightly. 
We had an excellent example of this mis- 
conception the other day when Mr. Tennant read 
out in the House of Commons the total admitted 
losses published in the German lists up to the end 
of November. Many people imagined that this 
meant a British official estimate of the total Ger- 
man losses to the end of last month. 
It was, of course, nothing of the kind. It was 
merely the sum total of the published lists in 
Germany up to that date. 
Now we know at about what rate the German 
lists are published. The average delay is rather 
over one month and a half. We further know 
that prisoners in the hands of the Allies are often 
not to be discovered in the lists of missing pub- 
lished by the German War Office, and we may 
legitimately presume that there are corresponding 
omissions in the case of lightly wounded men whose 
condition does not seem grave enough to report, 
and even in other cases. Further, the German 
casualty lists do not mention the sick, though they 
profess to mention deaths from sickness when 
those deaths take place in the hospitals. 
The German statement that nearly 90 per cent, 
of their wounded return lo active service (and a 
further unofficial statement that the corresponding 
Austrian figures are nearly 80 per cent.) is also 
misleading. 
Figures of that kind can always be drawn up 
if you select your statistics for the purpose of 
impressing uninformed opinion. You may, for 
instance, only deal with hospitals at the base. 
You may count as capable of ultimately returning 
to active service all men not actually discharged 
from the army and possibly able, at some undefined 
future date to undertake light work. You may 
omit the statistics for sickness, etc. You may in 
one way or another arrive at almost any result you 
hke. 
But in practice everyone knows perfectly 
well how the thing pans out. Of a total casualtx' 
hst, dead, missing, wounded and sick, about one- 
quarter get back to the firing line and are used 
again in the same active work which they left when 
they fell ill or were wounded — and that is all that 
really counts. The wounded in our own lines, 
for instance, account for not quite two-thirds of 
the total (in Flanders up to December 9th 64.9 
per cent."), and of those two- thirds about two. 
