January G, 1916. 
L A N D A N I) \\ A T E R . 
OUR MOBILISABLE STRENGTH. 
By HILAIRE BELLOC. 
NOTE.-TI.i8 Article has been submitted to the Press Bureau, which do3S not object to the publication as censored, and lakes no 
responsibility for the correctness of the statements. 
In accordance with the requirements of the Press Bureau, the positions of troops on Plans illustrating this Article must only be 
regarded as approximate, and no definite strength at any point is indicated. 
THE most interesting points arising with 
regard to the great war this week— 
that is, up to the moment of writing- 
are not points concerning movements of 
troops or susceptible of analysis by description of 
ground. They rather concern the two questions 
of (i) British numbers, which have so powerfully 
affected and even divided opinion in this country 
during the last few days, and the very interesting 
minor points of (2) the reliability of German com- 
muniques, both with regard to wastage and other 
matters as tested by the recent striking object- 
lesson of the Hartsmannweilerkopf figures wiiich 
we have been able to submit to analysis in a rather 
exceptional fashion, from the presence of Neutral 
and British witnesses and from the striking 
contradiction between the French and the German 
figures. 
Let us suppose that Great Britain and Ireland 
were a Continental group, possessed of the popula- 
tion they have to-day, self-contained, so far as the 
sheer necessities of civil life were concerned, and 
suffering or enduring a complete system of con- 
scription, such as the French alone of the great 
Powers have established. 
What would be the mobilisable strength of the 
nation under these conditions ? (To which may 
be added the necessity of supporting a much smaller 
fleet, but not the necessity of building or main- 
taining or manning any considerable mercantile 
marine). 
Such a nation would, before the outbreak of 
this great war, have " budgetted " (if one may 
apply this word to an estimate of man-power) 
for a total armed force, available in the first year 
of war of about 4^^ million — counting the men 
required for the work of the fleet. 
Under the strain of the war it would, if we 
are to follow the analogy of the French and German 
man-power, have worked very hard to put into the 
field some additional number, and it would, under 
the same analogy, have succeeded. It would ha\'e 
produced first and last by the beginning of .\ugust 
1915 (counting its naval contingent) something 
between 5| miUion and 5| million. 
Great Britain is not a continental power, and 
is not self-sufficing for its civihan needs. 
Its main, strength lies in a navy which (count- 
ing mobilised man-power and the man-power 
required for the upkeep of munitionment thereof 
and addition thereto during the war), accounts 
immediately for more than half a million men. 
This half million, it is true, is not rapidly subject 
to wastage ; but still it is a definite permanent 
deduction from the mobilisable strength by land. 
Next, Great Britain depends (has come to 
depend — I do not say it is a necessity, I note it 
only as a condition which cannot be changed in 
the course of a war, nor indeed for a very long 
time to come) upon o\-er-sea trade for her civihan 
necessities. 
Now what does this mean in absorption or 
subtraction of man-power ? 
It means the absorption of man-power in 
two great categories, exterior to the categories 
present in a self-contained continental nation. 
These two categories are : 
(i) The man-power required to produce goods 
for export by which alone the imports necessary 
to existence can be secured. 
(2) The man-power required to build, repair 
and conduct the ships and other instruments 
bringing such imports to the islands and taking 
such exports out of them. 
Let us examine these two categories. 
(i) The man-power required to produce goods 
for export, with which we pay for imports, is not 
in its entirety a subtraction from the man-power 
which a continental power would be able to 
mobilise. 
There is a certain amount of over-lap. We 
import dairy produce, for instance, as against 
certain exports. Those exports are made not 
only by mobilisable men but by women and by men 
miUtarily inefficient, or above or below military 
age. The labour necessary to produce this export 
corresponds to the labour required in a continental 
self-sufficing country to raise the dairy produce. 
Nevertheless, though there is a considerable 
over-lap in the main export, trade demands a far 
higher proportion of mobilisable man-power to be 
deducted for its maintenance than does the corre- 
sponding production of domestic, civilian neces- 
sities. 
Such export takes the form largely of ma- 
chinery, coal, textile fabrics ; and in the latter 
alone is there any considerable proportion of non- 
mobilisable labour. A self-contained nation at 
war can reduce its domestic production down and 
down till, excluding munitions of war and the 
machinery necessary thereto, it is producing little 
more than food. It can postpone its building and 
to some extent its repair of building. It can very 
largely reduce its production of machinery, barely 
keeping up what is required for domestic com- 
munications on a highly reduced scale. It can 
economise on its production of coal, already 
reduced by a reduction of domestic industry, and 
it can very largely reduce its production of textiles. 
But a nation to which import is vital, and to 
which export is therefore also vital, cannot act 
thus. It cannot export what it chooses. Still 
less can it reduce indefinitely its domestic pro- 
duction for export. It must jiroduce what its 
customers need or it will have no market, and it 
must produce a certain amount of economic value 
for export in such goods or it will get no food. 
It may seem superfluous to add the reason 
why export is thus essential, if imports are to be 
obtained ; but for the sake of clearness such an 
addition, though to most people redundant, may be 
advisable. 
There are only four wa\s of getting imports 
from abroad. Payment in gold, the release of 
{Copyright in America by " The New York Awerican."] 
