LAND AND WATER 
February lo, 19 lO- 
CHANCES OF A GERMAN OFFENSIVE. 
By Hilaire Belloc. 
THE elder and greater Moltkc said : " There are 
always three courses open to the enemy — 
and he takes the fourth." 
That epigram illustrates completely the 
folly of prophesy in war. 
But the following of a campaign, while it does not 
ever permit of e."«ict forecast, does show one, with a 
clearness in proportion to the closeness of the study, the 
conditions under which alone the futiue can develop. 
For instance, no one could tell during the Russian 
retreat of last sunmicr upon what line the equilibrium 
would be restored and the Austro-Cierman forces compelled 
to halt. But what any competent observer coi/Wsayand 
what all competent observers did say was that unless 
some organic portion of the Russian armies was destroyed 
such a line of " balance " or equilibrium between advance 
and retreat would be established, and that when or if it 
was the Austro-German stroke would have missed its 
object. 
As a matter of fact the whole development of the 
affair proved the truth of so elementary a statement. 
We saw the Austro-Germans entirely devoted for four 
months to the destruction of some organic portion of the 
Russian Army. We saw them again and again (six 
times in all) create a great salient or bulge in the Russian 
line by massing their immense superiority in heavy gims 
against two separate sectors. We saw them try hard 
to cut off that bulge— and fail. The particular line upon 
which equilibrium was reached after these si.\ failures 
(the last of which was the great effort round Vilna) was 
the line with which we are now so familiar from the Gulf of 
Riga to the Bukovina. But this halting place of the 
Austro-Germans was forced upon them. It was not 
deliberately chosen. They stopped when their advance 
had weakened them to a degree after which they could no 
longer compel a further Russian retirement ; and this was 
clear from the way in which they went on week after week 
throwing men away without avail against the Dvina line. 
They had, in Lord Kitchener's exceedingly exact phrase, 
" shot their bolt," words which so unduly angered the 
Press of all Berlin and part of London. 
The same set of ideas applies to the present situation. 
To prophesy that the enemy will make a great offensive 
here or there, that he will make it before we do, or any- 
thing of that kind, would be futile. But to say that 
whatever he does must be done under certain conditions, 
to establish the limits within which his action and our 
own must turn, is both possible and useful, and a study 
of that kind will enable us to understand the future. 
Decline of Numbers Governs the Enemy's Plan. 
The one fundamental condition governing all the 
present plan of the enemy, is that which has been 
emphasised repeatedly in these columns : The exhaustion 
of the enemy's useful reserve. 
r That phrase does not mean that his. armies in the 
iield have grown less or will grow less for some little time 
to come. It means that the period has arrived in which 
the enemy can only by an abnormal treatment of his 
human material maintain himself at full strength, and 
that the limit of time within which that abnormal treat- 
ment can be sustained is at once short and its duration 
clearly appreciated. 
Somewhere towards the end of November or the 
beginning of December, what I have just called the 
" period of abnormal treatment " had begun. That is, 
the drafts necessary for the tilling up of gaps in his units 
at the front had to be found in a novel and unsatisfactory 
fashion. 
Up to that date the drafts had been furnished nor- 
mally. The normal fashion of furnishing drafts is to 
take' men of military age and fully efficient : to train 
them ; when they are trained, to keep them in depots ; 
from such a reserve in hand to "feed" the units at the 
front and keep them at their full strength.. 
Rather more than two months ago this normal 
source was drying up. It remained possible only to 
draft men younger than those of full military age, or 
older, or to begin to trespass upon the held of what arc 
called " inefiicients." There is no precise Hue of demar- 
cation between the efficient and the inefficient. But 
the rough rule is that when you begin to sift out again, 
and yet again, for recruits, a mass already rejected you 
are getting near the line. 
The nrst drafts of inefficients but very slightly 
we.iken your units, for they are few and their level of 
efficiency is comparatively high. But the process is 
cumulative, and the curve soon gets steep. The 
moment you trespass on the " inefficient " field 'your 
anxieties have begun. 
We know perfectly well — at least all soldiers know 
■ — that this was already clearly the state of affairs 
about a month before the end of the year, and it is 
also perfectly well known by what abnormal method the 
enemy met it. 
He ceased to develop any considerable and expensive 
attacks ; he turned to some extent to the younger men 
as volunteers, to some extent as conscripts. He began 
to include what was at first a very small proportion (and 
what still remains no great proportion) of inefficients ; and 
he deliberately kept back the lads (the boys from 18 to 
19) whose ren)aining numbers (not yet volunteered) may 
amount to Soo.ooo and are probably not less than 600,000. 
Briefly, the process might be called " Trusting to a 
lull and to filling the gaps with inefficients in order to 
keep back the remaining efficient but very j'outhful 
groups for the last chance of decisive operations later on." 
Comparative Position of the Allies. 
Here, of course, we must remember that the enemy's 
exhaustion thus described must be compared with the 
condition of his opponents. 
Had all the belligerents been from the beginning 
fully conscript nations, all fighting at their top strength 
also from the beginning, and all suffering proportionately 
equal loss, then this fundamental factor, the exhaustion 
of the enemy reserves, would not have the consequences 
we shall point out in a moment. It would apply equally 
to both sides and would leave either party free to act 
almost as Ihey had acted in the past. 
But in point of fact the two sides differ verj' greatly 
in this respect. 
Only one of the Allied services has been fighting at 
full strength from the beginning, and that is the French 
—whose numbers are but a third of the Austro-German. 
The Russians, the British, the Italians possess untouched 
very great reseiyes of men, and even the French, though 
they ha\-e called up their \ery young classes (which the 
(iermans have not yet fully done) are in proportion 
to their numbers, less severely hit than the enemy. They 
have not begun to think of touching inefficient reserves. 
They have not severely sifted the rejected over and over 
again as the enemy has been compelled to do. They 
feel themselves free, in particular, to abstain from using 
the older classes which the enemy has been compelled tc 
use up largely in the field. 
What the disproportion of losses between the 
French fully conscript force fighting from the beginning 
at full strength, and the enemy similarly fighting, 
may be exactly we do not know. For though \\e 
can now estimate to within 10 per cent, one way or 
the other the total German losses, we have not the same 
data for the I'rench. The l'"rench proportion of losses to 
their numbers may be as low as five-sixths that of the 
enemy, or as high as nine-tenths. It is not very material, 
because the two main facts are known : h'irst, that the 
French losses are somewhat inferior in jiroportion 
Secondly, that the difference is not so great as to affccl 
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