LAND AND WATER 
January 27, 1916. 
by way of example to show what results from its 
absence. 
I will take for this object-lesson two things ; 
one positive, one negative. The first is a case of 
insufficient official pronouncement upon a funda- 
mental matter guiding all our judgment ; the other 
an actual omission to provide official information 
in a matter where that information abundantly 
e.xists and where its public statement would have 
been of the highest value. 
The first of these examples consists in the 
figures twice read out recently to the House of 
C'ommons by the Under-Secretary of War, Mr. 
Tennant, upon German losses ; the second consists 
in the analysis of enemy casualties and enemy 
statements in connection with the great offensive 
of last September. 
GERMAN CASUALTIES. 
On Tuesday, the 21st of last December, Mr. 
Tennant, in answer to a question put him by Lord 
Kerry, quoted the following figures for the German 
casualties published in all the lists for the Land 
Forces of the German Empire up to the 30th of 
November, 1915 : 
He gave the total of those casualty lists at 
2,524,460. 
He further told us that of this total 484,218 
represented killed or died of wounds, 384,198 
represented the severely wounded, 27,674 repre- 
sented those who had died from disease, 381,149 
represented the missing. 
It would, I think, astonish the authorities 
were they able to see the mass of correspondence 
and private calculation which followed imme- 
diately upon this very imperfect official statement. 
Because it was official the great mass of opinion 
seized upon it, took it for a complete and exact 
piece of evidence, and drew conclusions accord- 
ingly- 
It drew, especially, the utterly false conclusion 
that these figures represented the Official British 
view of the total German losses up to the end of 
November — that is, during sixteen full months of 
fighting. The figures so given — because they 
were officiallj' given — formed the basis of innum- 
erable private calculations, the general conclusion 
of which was that as, of the total a certain balance 
not named presumably represented light cases of 
wounded, most of whom would return to the 
front, the dead loss of the German forces in the 
first sixteen months of fighting was a little over a 
million and a quarter men I 
Now, the War Office never intended so farcical 
a result. It was not giving its own calculation. 
It was merely giving the German official total. 
It knew that this official German total of November 
30th referred to a date many weeks earlier. It 
knew that the lists even so were incomplete. It 
knew that the only doubt about total German 
dead loss up to the end of November is whether 
it is about 3! millions or about 3f millions — the 
only real discussion in the matter is on the margin 
of the quarter million. The War Office also knew 
that not a man in Europe who is following these 
things with attention (out of the hundreds of 
men so engaged) would put the absolute losses in 
the first sixteen months of the war at less than 
3,200,000, while very few would put them as 
high as four million — though the French General 
Staff, in its detailed and exhaustive calculations, 
based upon the widest possible range of evidence, 
is not short of that fieure. 
We all know then that Mr. Tennant did not 
intend to convey by that answer the astonish- 
ing conclusions to which his hearers none 
the less came — that German losses were about 
one-third of the truth. We all know that the 
highly-trained and competent permanent officials 
who furnished him with those ligures were npt 
within a thousand miles of such an intention. 
All those figures meant was that the enemy's 
own ofticial total of killed and wounded only 
(not sick) — which happened to be dated the 30tli 
of November, and referred to early October — was 
2. I milhon odd, divided as wc have seen, into 
killed, missing, etc. The enemy's own authorities 
would be the first to admit themselves the two 
great modifications : First, that the lists are 
belated, secondly, that they leave out all cases 
of sickness (except deaths from sickness). Every 
single observer in Europe could further prove 
that the lists were incomplete — for there is 
abundant evidence of this — and that in particular 
the category " Deaths from Disease " was so falsely 
stated as to be unworthy of notice. 
For all this of course neither Mr. Tennant 
nor the Permanent Officials who supplied the 
figures are in any way to blame. They were asked 
to say how the German totals stood, and they 
replied accurateh* : " The German totals published 
on the 30th of November give such and such 
figures." 
So far so good — or so bad. The meaning and 
extent of an official statement had been wholly 
misunderstood by the public not because the 
statement was slipshod or false, but because it 
was so unexpanded that the misunderstanding 
was almost bound to occur. 
But something was to follow much worse 
even than this misunderstanding due to incom- 
plete statement. 
Exactly four weeks later on Wednesday, 
January 19th, Mr. Tennant again read out in the 
House of Commons in answer to a question, a new 
set of " revised " figures which were obviously at 
variance with his first. This new set of figures 
referred to totals later arrived at here by a careful 
revision of the individual German lists up to some 
date before the end of the year. 
But all the public could grasp in so brief and 
incomplete a statement was the idea that this 
second set of figures was again the official view of 
our Government of the German losses up to 
December 31st, supplementary to the one given 
" up to November 30th." In other words they 
imagined that our Government had given them 
its official and considered view of the total Germ.iii 
losses during December. 
The result was startling. 
• This second set of figures was as follows : — 
The dead now came to 588,986 ; the wounded 
to 1,566,549. The dead from disease to 24,08c 
and the missing to 356,153. 
That general instructed public which had 
taken such a hold upon the first set of figures 
immediately began to analyse this second set and 
was very naturally bewildered. They noticed the 
following points : — 
I. That apparently in this one month of 
December, when there had been the least fighting 
of all, the 17th month of the war, 104,768 Germans 
had been killed ! 
In other words the Germans during that 
astonishing month had been killed off more than 
twice as fast as they had during the heavy fighting 
of the summer and autumn I 
