January 6, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER 
the shortage of carters to-day, for instance, which, 
I hear, is the chief difficulty at the water fronts. 
The conclusion of the matter would seem to 
be something after- this fashion. 
Great Britain and Ireland may support in 
theory an armed force of four million men, or 
rather more, excluding any particular function 
we may serve of provisioning or financing (which 
is the same thing under another name) our allies, 
and excluding any necessity we may be under of 
ol^taining from them and for ourselves impoi'ts of 
a purely military nature from neutral countries. 
If the limit be raised to four and a half millions, 
we have almost certainly reached the maximum ; 
and this figure, of course does not mean the army 
in the field, but for the army with all the drafts in 
sight behind it to repair wastage, and includes all 
forms of the naval service (you have by the way, 
in the latter a considerable number of men over 
and below what is called military age on land, 
especially in the auxiliary forms of naval service : 
e.g., mine-sweeping). 
Over and above such a number you have only 
the annual contingents of the young men growing 
up. These are, to any given mobilisable number 
in the first year of war, something between one- 
eight and one-tenth at the most, according to the 
population and birth-rate of twenty years ago. 
It is perhaps as well to add that calculations 
of this sort should in common decency during 
such a crisis be kept free from the personal am- 
bitions of petty individual politicians and news- 
papermen, and especially from that spirit of 
advocacy which is the worst enemy of wisdom, 
and whose chief ingredient is the great solvent 
of wisdom, cunning. The mobilisable strength 
of Great Britain at this moment is a very grave 
national matter, which it is not rhetorical to call a 
matter of life and death. Those who bring to it 
anything but their best judgment and reason and 
sober conclusions, those who act with motives in 
any way personal and not national, are traitors. 
THE HARTMANS WEILERKOPF 
FIGURES. 
We have had this week a very interesting 
example of two elements in the present situation 
which all close students of the war are aware of 
and regard as important. 
These two elements are first, the type of false- 
hood which we do well to expect in the enemy's 
official communiques ; and secondly, the appear- 
ance, now many weeks old and necessarily in- 
creasing, of inefficients among the enemy's drafts. 
The example of a single action very carefully 
noted has brilliantly illuminated both these points 
in the last few days. I refer to the action on the 
Hartmansweilerkopf or Vicl Armand, the 
]>yramidical foothill of the Vosges which directly 
overlooks the Plain of Alsace. 
My readers will, I hope, allow me to repeat that 
the study of an enemy's inaccuracies or falsehoods 
has no military value, and does not help us to any 
military judgment, unless we discover the kind 
of falsehood. Merely to find one's enemy telling 
untruths and to blackguard him for it is a sheer 
waste of time. First, because all commands in 
war must use every method at their disposal to 
deceive the enemy, and secondly because no con- 
ceivable practical result could follow from indulging 
in such abuse alone. 
But if we discover the sort of falsehood to 
which the enemy inclines then we lun-c sometliing 
whereby to judge his communiques as evidence. 
" The enemy communiques have said so and so 
and so and so, but I have found by experience 
that tuch and such a part of his statement is 
usually accurate and such and such another part 
usually false, and that in such and such a manner. 
With this knowledge of his methods I can read 
the whole tiuth into the communiqiies and use 
it as evidence on which to judge the war." 
Now the characteristic of the German official 
communiques, as we have often had occasion to 
find out, is their extreme accuracy when they are 
telhng the truth, and what I may call their detailed 
enormity when they desire to deceive. There 
is no nuance. The modern North German training 
leads men to abhor exaggeration, inaccuracy, 
romance, phantasy. Therefore a statement pro- 
ceeding from such an authority intended to be 
false and intended to deceive, is nearly always a 
bald absurdity. It is One of the many weak 
sides of a character which has corresponding 
strong sides, and it is a weakness inevitable to 
lack of imagination and great attention to 
detail. 
The extreme accuracy of German communiques 
when they are telling the truth has misled opinion 
in this country, especially in the later phases of the 
war. One finds men of good judgment who 
hesitate to believe that German casualty Usts are 
not complete. The other day one of our best 
contemporary students of war maintained the 
thesis that the German communiques were in- 
variably truthful. 
Well, we have had many examples of the sort 
of contrast I am examining between detailed 
accuracy and equally detailed absurdity. Nearly 
a year ago we were startled by the tomfool boast 
that the great assault east of Rheims was met and 
broken by a single di^'ision of Rhinelanders. 
Later on, to mention one case out of hundreds, 
we had the monstrous assertion that of all the 
men hit on the German side in trench warfare 
nine-tenths came bacR hale and hearty to the 
firing line ! I myself have actually met competent 
and sensible people in this country who were so 
impressed by the decimal figures in which the 
percentage was stated (89.7) and the solemn fake 
of accuracy about the whole thing, that they were 
half inclined to beUeve the miracle. They attri- 
buted it vaguely to those two great wooden gods, 
"Efficiency" and "Organisation": the things 
that lost the Battle of the Marne. 
But I am not sure that the Hartmansweiler- 
kopf affair will not carry conviction to everyone, 
however occupied with the Prussian legend — that 
legend which has bitten so deeply into the academic 
mind of this country during the last two genera- 
tions. 
Here is the whole story. 
The French, after an intense bombardment, 
captured a group of trenches upon the disputed 
summit of this hill a few days before Christmas. 
The Germans counter-attacked and recovered 
a portion of their ground. All that is plain sailing 
and the enemy's account of his counter-offensive 
though omitting, of course, much of the debit side, 
is perfectly accurate in as far as it goes. But there 
follows upon this the following dialogue : — 
The French announced that they had taken 
in prisoners — and they only count unwounded 
prisoners capable of being paraded and of marching 
past — over 1,300 men. At the close of operations 
tl-.c exact number announced was 1.668 prisoners ; 
