April 13, 1 916 
LAND & VV A T E R 
possible at nil. But if lie know liis history well and roiikl 
compare the situation with a hundred other such in the 
past, he would kno\y how the niisconce'ptioris had arisen. 
It' is our whole business in this critical ihbment to-day 
to see the thing as he would see it and to correct those 
misunderstandings to which, if we are not wise, that 
historian may have to ascribe our defeat. For to con- 
:lude the struggle before Prussia is disarmed is to suffer 
defeat, with all the consequences of that disaster for 
Europe and ourselves. 
Let us therefore state once more the merely military 
problem of the moment. The- enemy is trying " to take 
Verdun."' In ]\Icsopotamia a relieving force is trying to 
disengage a single division contained by the Turks upon 
the Tigris. What, apart from all effect upon non-com- 
hatants, is the merely military meaning of these two 
efforts ? 
The isolated force contained upon the Tigris is not a 
quarter, it is not a sixth, of a single Allied force in 
action last Sunday upon one tiny front of nine miles out 
of the French front. It numbers in effectives not a half 
per cent, of the men actually engaged upon the western 
front. 
Upon the other hand, the phrase, " to take Verdun " 
has, in the purely military sense, no significance whatso- 
ever. The whole meaning and the only meaning, so far 
as the military problem is concerned, of the struggle round 
Verdun, is the proportion of loss which either party has 
suffered at any stage during the attack. There is no 
question of breaking the French line. Ihere is no 
question of the "surrender of the fortress," for there is 
no fortress to surrender. No army is surrounded or 
nearly surrounded. No mass of material and munitions 
even is in jeopardy. The enemy is prepared to sacrifice 
a certain number of men over and above the number of 
men which he puts out of action upon our side. He is 
prepared to exhaust himself in this degree in order to be 
able to .say that his soldiers stand in the ruins of a par- 
ticular town — that is, upon a particular geographical 
area upon the map — there is now nothing more whatso- 
ever to be discovered in his efforts. 
Why is he prepared to do this ? 
Because he believes that the effect, not military but 
political, not upon soldiers studying the military problems 
of disarming an opponent, but upon civilian opinion — 
outside France — will be such as to determine an early 
peace in his favour. For the same reason he may direct 
his last efforts against ourselves. 
In the first days of the attack upon Verdun he had 
another object. He thought that he would break the 
French line. Now he knows that this cannot be done. 
And we know it too. But he is persuaded that by the 
continual repetition of the name " Verdun," by the con- 
tinual description of it as a fortress, by the concentration of 
the world's attention upon those mere houses, his presence 
among their ruins will shake the confidence of his foes 
and perhaps determine some accession of neutral aid for 
himself. The whole thing may be compared to the point 
which we ridicule so rightly in the later mediaeval wars, 
when the capture of a single personage in an action was 
regarded by both parties as decisive. Because the French 
King John was taken prisoner at Poitiers, a victory which 
might have ended in the complete domination of France 
1)y Ihe Plantagenets and came (o within an ace of pro- 
ducing, a generation later, the union of France and Eng- 
land under one crown, was thought to have been gained. 
M'ho to-day pkys the least attention to the death or the 
capture of a political individual in an action ? Who 
some time hence will conceive it possible that the mere 
moving backwards or forwards of a small section of an 
unbroken line upon the western front appeared to so 
many contemporaries an event of capital importance ? 
The French higher command has for now nearly two 
months stood strictly upon the defensive — " killing 
(iermans." \\'hy ? 
It is a tremendous moral strain on chiefs and men 
alike, in restraint of temper and in endurance of evil and 
pain. 
There is a superabundance of men for a counter offen- 
sive : Wo out-number the enemy in the West by much 
more than half as much again as the total of his forces 
there. Yet the French line stands round Verdun abso- 
lutely restricted to defence for weeks and weeks, and, 
at stated times, slowly withdrawing — killing and maiming 
the enemy in heaps. Is it not ob\ ious why ? 
I repeat, it is our whole duty in this moment, and the 
duty of all those whose opinions in sum make up that 
national judgment upon which governments repose, to 
treat the struggle round Verdun simply and solely from 
the point of view of numbers. What sacrifice can we 
impose upon the enemy ? What price can we make him 
pay for something which has no military value ? of how 
much blood will that exhausted body still let itself be 
bled. That is the only thing that counts. 
If at the end of the fight round Verdun the French 
Ime ran from the Argonne south-eastward direct to St. 
Mihiel ; if the enemy were present at the close upon all 
the ground now held by the French within the salient 
(including of course the area of Verdun town itself), 
and if in the balance of loss and gain the enemy had lost 
200,000 men more than the French, then the action would 
be an asset of the highest value to the Allied side. If the 
extra margin of loss was not 200,000, but half a million, 
it would not only be a victory, but probably a decisive 
victory turning the whole war. 
To see that point clearly and to retain it unshaken 
throughout all the vicissitudes of the battle is, so far as 
mere opinion is concerned, to win the war, and it will 
be doing exactly that which the enemy most fears our 
doing. 
To that numerical estimate of the situation we must 
add another corollary equally important. If the Allies 
can compel the enemy thus to exhaust himself upon the 
Aveetern front it will be with the object of destroying him 
when the counter-offensive shall be launched. 
The troops concentrated by the Germans .throughout 
the pre\'ious forty-eight hours were launched in the clear 
weather of last Sunday, April loth. 
The comprehension of what followed will be the easier 
if we merely draw a line without contours, marking with 
crosses at i and 2 the heights of the Mort Homme and of 
Hill 304. 
One body, amounting to somewhat less than two 
divisions, attacked along the arrows AAA, its left coming 
short of Bethincourt by some hundreds of yards, and its 
Something 
right being a little to the west of Avocourt. 
BethinCOUit 
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