LAND & WATER 
May i8, 1916 
upon two separate pieces of front, the most crowded one 
ot which is narrow : the open country between the Black 
Mountain and the Adriatic. Her role there is to hold the 
dense Austrian line with artillery work wliich is as good 
as any in Europe, and we have every evidence that the 
Austrian losses at this point after a year of warfare is 
out of proportion to the Austrian losses in any other 
field of the war. The pressure here must be getting 
severe, as exhaustion in recruitment is beginning to tell. 
It may soon provoke a diversion. 
But for such a task Italy does not need a mass of 
mobilisable men, and there stands behind the army in 
action a very large potential reserve of man-power. 
With Russia, again, there is a separate and quite 
different cause for the reser\'e of man-j>ower which she 
can boast. So large are those reserves that even if Russia 
had the same power of equipment and munitionment 
which the industrial civilisations of the west and south 
possess, she would never have put into the field at any 
one time, even upon her vast front, all her human resources. 
But she is handicapped by great difficulties in munition- 
ment and equipment. The evil results of these difliculties 
in the great retreat of last year we all know. But, on the 
other side of the account, there is the presence of masses 
of men pouring through the depots, trained and passed 
on to the front as equipment is obtained and munition- 
ment produced or purchased. 
The next consideration after we have got a clear view 
of the way in which numbers stand, is the consideration 
of the length of front to be held. 
There is no exhaustion, nor any approach to exhaustion 
of reser\-e power in Italy, England or Russia. There is 
the approadi of such exhaustion in the three fully mobi- 
lised powers of France. Germany and Austro-Hungary. 
But when we consider the ffonts to be held by the belli- 
gerents in tliis war of po.sitions, this element gives the 
problem a very different significance from what it would 
have if we were considering forces in movement. 
Our enemy has to keep troops — if we exclude the 
Asiatic campaigns — upon fronts, difficult to estimate 
exactly on account of the mountainous character of the 
southern belts, but not less in all their sinuosities than 
2,500 miles. The two chief fronts, however, upon which 
the campaign depends and which must be held in full 
strength, are the eastern and the western which, between 
them, come to about 1,500 miles. 
The German Empire alone {to take the case which we 
can study most precisely) has almost exactly 1,000 miles 
of front to hold, of which just over half is on the west and 
just under a half on the east. 
These fronts have been arrived at, not by the deliberate 
policy of the German commanders but by the hazard of 
war. 
The German armies did not stand where they chose to 
stand in the west. They stood where they could. They 
were pinned, in spite of themselves, to a line only part 
of which was at first organised. They have tried hard to 
break out since the autumn of 1914 and they have failed. 
Their considerable extension towards the east in 
Poland is not clue to any policy of occupying such and 
such districts, but to the fact that they "reached their 
present lines after equilibrium was restored between their 
immense superiority in equipped men and munitions and 
the Russian inferiority therein. They stand where they 
stood seven months ago, halted after a series of tremendous 
efforts {all of which failed) to envelop the Russian armies 
during the great retreat. 
Though the very extended front which the German 
irmies, to speak of these alorio, are holding, thus include 
ilien territory- which they think can be used as an asset 
.•or the obtaining of an inco.aclu?-.;ve peace, that is of no 
purely mHitary advantage \ehatsoever. It is indifferent 
so far as the military problem is concerned, whether the 
line stands in Poland or Prussia. It is its length and 
its facility of supply that cotmt. The great extension 
of these fronts and their distance from supply, especially 
in the case of the eastern line, -itand in the balance against, 
and not in favour of, those 'who hold them.* What has 
• We must not follow the anaVogy of past wars here. Distance with 
\ good railway supply is not Ine same thing as distance wHth' supply 
t>y horse and waggon. But the Gcrn lan eastern front dois suffer from 
length and paucity of cor.rmuni< ations throughout the winter. 
This, as definite collected evidence 'has shown, was a cause of heavy 
losses from sickness. The enemy cca iccals this (of course) in his iiub- 
Mied lists. 
been deliberate in the policy of the German Government, 
if not in the strategy of the German commanders, has 
been the determination to stand on these extended lines 
probably beyond the moment when it would be prudent 
to shorten them, and certainly up to the very last moment 
of such prudence. 
If the Russian forces were in precisely the same situa- 
tion of munitionment and equipment as the western 
forces the situation, already clear to most observers of 
this campaign, would be equally clear to the whole world, 
instructed or uninstructed. 
The Allies have an overwhelming superiority in re- 
serves of men ; only one of them is in anything like the same 
state of exhaustion as the enemy. 
The enemy has come to hold fronts requiring all his 
armies in the field, save a small margin stiJl remaining 
for offensive power, but rapidly dwindhng. The end of 
such a situation would be almost mathematically certain. 
But Russia is not in the same situation for munition- 
ment and equipment as the western powers, and it is this 
distinction between the eastern and western fronts which 
gives its particular character to the whole position. 
Lastly, there is an estimate to be made of the position 
in munitionment and supply. 
We do not know, of course, the exact numbers of 
shell produced in each belligerent country per day at 
any moment. One hears roughly from time to time 
what is being produced in the various countries of the 
Allies, and one hears what the enemy claims to be pro- 
ducing. One can estimate the probable truth of his 
claims, and one can estimate by the nature of the activity 
shown and by the rate at which the effort has developed 
in the factories of the Allied countries, how far the esti- 
mate one hears of their production agrees with the truth. 
The general conclusion — without giving away even the 
broadest statistics — is roughly that the Allies in the West 
turn out munitions at a rather higher rate than the Central 
Empires. The Central Empires are not producing half a 
million shells a day, nor will they ever produce half a 
million shells a day. But they may pass the 400,000. 
The actual production of Russia is supplemented by 
purchase from abroad and by the aid of her Allies. 
You cannot industrialise a great country in a few months, 
nor produce a system of railways in the same time where 
it was lacking before. 
Of the two parties one is far more severely handicapped 
for general supply than the other. The Allies are far 
less burdened by want than the Central Powers and 
Turkey. Thej' suffer in the west from a restriction of 
freight, in the east from the great distances from which 
industrial products must be brought. But the Central 
Powers are now really hampered, even for food — more 
for leather, rubber, fats and oils. We cannot starve 
them, unfortunately. But we increasingly strain them. 
Now if you put all these points together, we can, I 
think, see how things stand in this late spring or early 
summer of 1916. We cannot prophecy, of course, or say 
that the enemy will attack here or there. But we can 
estimate his necessities and opportunities. 
The Germans clearly believe themselves to be the 
driving power of their combination. And they are 
right. They possess a sufficiency of men in the younger 
classes to release or to recruit the human material for 
one more considerable effort. They will make that effort. 
It would have been better perhaps for them if they had 
chosen or been able to cut their losses in front of Verdun 
in time. It is possible that they feared a counter-action 
had they stopped earlier in front of Verdim. It is possible 
that they continued to believe till long after the oppor- 
tunity had passed that they would succeed in breaking 
the French line. It is possible that they suffered some 
admixture of purely domestic, political motive. It is 
very probable that they were misinformed as to the 
political temper of the French and believed that heavy 
French losses before Verdun, even at an expense to them- 
selves of something like 3 to i, were pohtically 
worth inflicting.* 
Whatever the reasons for the continuance of the action 
• I omit all reference to the silly talk about " stopping the spring 
offensive of the Allies." No such offensive was ever intended, nor did 
the enemy's Higher Command ever expect it. Thev began emplacing 
their heavy guns near Spincourt right in mid-winter. l)ecause they 
thought they could provoke and win a " Hattle of Verdun. " They 
did provoke it. but thev lost it utterly. 
