May i8, 1916 
LAND & WA T E K 
in front of Verdun — and it has been an otvious folly^ 
continued it has been with losses that will only leave the 
enemy strong enough for another and less violent offen- 
sive in the immediate future. 
He must deliver such an offensive because he must 
attack. His exhaustion condemns him to it, and the 
perpetually increasing numbers of his foes. On the day 
when he confesses that he can attack no longer he is done. 
On the other hand it is the obvious policy of the Allied 
command to constrain him to such an attack and to re- 
duce him to that position to which the counter-offensive 
at last undertaken against him shall be of certain effect, 
and shall complete his ruin. 
He must attack. Where will he attack ? The only 
men who can answer that question even approximately 
are the men at the British, the French and the Russian 
headquarters. But we see at least that one of two obvious 
opportunities lies before the enemy. He may attack 
elsewhere. He may attack in Volhynia, or even waste 
himself against Salonika. He might foolishly strike on 
the Italian front where no decision is possible at all. 
But his obvious main opportunities are not there. His 
obvious opportunities are either against the British front 
on the west and where it joins the French, or against the 
northern Russian front in the east. The soil is drying. 
He may have misjudged the political element on 
the eastern side as much as he has misjudged it on 
the west. We may say that there is no decision to 
be arrived at by one last violent thrust in this field, and 
the argument is sound. But he may believe that there 
is a better chance here of some effect than there would 
be against those Western Powers who have easily proved 
his masters, who use their railways better than he does, 
can n(%v produce more shell than he can, and have just 
tamed him thoroughly after what was most certainly 
his most desperate effort. He is of course carefully 
watching the press of his opponents. He does not under- 
estimate the advantage he has in the unrestricted liberty 
of false and disheartening statement which our Allies 
so curiously note in the London press. He fully appre- 
ciates what kind of stuff may be printed here should some 
portion of the British front be subjected to a prolonged 
intensive bombardment, should he compel the retire- 
ment of troops upon any one sector of it in any con- 
siderable degree. 
THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALITIES 
As it Presents Itself to the Enemy 
When the great war broke out in Europe, the power 
which suddenly launched it — Prussia — was one which 
had in every form of its activity, denied national rights. 
The Universities, the Prussian military writers, the whole 
intellectual energy of the country in its every mani- 
festation had ridiculed and denied the old doctrine 
of national right in Europe. Austria Hungary was by 
its very constitution as a State a negation of those rights. 
It was a compromise whereby various irreconcilable 
national aims were united under one head and kept, as 
it were, upon a sort of balance. The House of Hapsburg, 
because its whole existence reposed upon separate 
nationaUties kept from fighting under an artificial unity, 
the House of Hohenzollern because it stood for the 
negation of national right, appeared before Europe as 
the protagonists of a theory which some would have 
called revived from the older* time before the French 
revolution, which others would have called particularly 
modem, but which in any case ignored the ideal of 
nationality and put in its place certain ideals of order 
and material comfort. 
It was no contradiction of this truth that the governing 
cliques in either case were patriotic. Obviously the 
Prussian landed classes patriotically desired the dominion 
of Prussia, as obviously the Magyars in the Austro- 
Hungarian combination desired the continued oppression 
of Slav populations, Roumanian and Serbian, over whom 
the Magyars ruled, and in so far those Magyar oppressors 
were patriots. 
But the combination of the Central Empires as a whole 
stood for the negation of national rights and the affirma- 
tion that this political religion was outworn. 
On this account it was that the Allies, varying as were 
their motives of antagonism against Prussia and her 
dependents, could take as a sort of general common 
ground the defence of the old European law. They could 
affirm that nationality was a sacred thing. The Russian 
commander issued his famous proclamation with regard 
to Poland. The violation of the neutrality of Belgium 
gave a rallying point in the same field of ideas to the 
British. The French, who alone of modern European 
nations had suffered annexation of territory in modern 
times, obviously could take this doctrine for their battle 
cry; and when later Italy came into the war the motive 
force of their action was the anomaly of Italian popula- 
tions living uhder Hapsburg rule. 
The very trigger which started the war — the Serbian 
question — was from top to bottom a national question, 
and in the first months of the war not a word was heard 
upon the enemy's side save of contempt for the national 
ideal, while most of the enthusiasm ujion the Allied side 
was in defence of that ideal. 
i Complexity of Motive 
As the great campaign developed, however, this simple 
issue, if it was simple at the very beginning, rapidly 
became obscured and distorted. At least five of the- 
smaller neutral nations could complain that the blockade 
of Germany and Austria, mild as that blockade was at 
the beginning of the war, offended their traditional 
rights. It was next apparent that sundry other neutral 
nations, also small, were unwilling to subscribe to the 
doctrines that the allied cause was the defence of national 
right. After all every one of the Allied nations was 
occupied in Africa and Asia or in Europe itself in governing 
portions of territory against their will, and the confusion 
of the issue was not to be marvelled at. 
When the King of Bulgaria, for very base motives, 
joined and became subject to Prussia, the issue was 
further confused. The increasing rigour of the blockade 
increased the irritation of certain smaller neutral nations. 
Then came the hesitation of Greece with the inevitable 
anomalies of the Allied occupation of a Greek port and 
sundry other consequences following upon that occupa- 
tion, lastly the ephemeral and local but startling rebellion 
in Ireland. 
It might truly be said that after twenty months of war 
the Central Empires no longer stood in the general mind 
for what they had represented during the space of several 
generations. They were no longer mere deniers and 
oppressors of national rights. Everyone seemed to be 
in the same boat so far as these were concerned. It was 
even possible for the German statesmen to play timidly 
with the, to them, fantastic and foreign doctrine that the 
people of one race, culture and territory had a moral 
right to govern themselves and that invasion of this 
right was a crime. 
Meanwhile the occupation of Poland by the Austro- 
German armies had given an opportunity to the enemy 
to suggest in his cries for peace the autonomy of this 
country which Prussia had been the first to massacre, 
and at whose rights the Kings of Prussia more than any 
other men had continuously jeered. 
Enemy Stupidity 
One might summarise the whole thing by saying that 
the old European tradition of national rights stood out 
clearly at the beginning of the war as a main issue between 
the combatants, but that developments taking place in 
the course of the war confused it, until it became, in the 
month of May, 1916, entirely obscured. 
Now I would suggest that the future of the war, 
particularly as the Central Empires begin to feel the 
material and obvious effects upon the map, and in their 
pockets, and their resources, and their aumies, of that 
defeat which they have already potentially suffered, will 
revive this matter of nationality and will perhaps end 
by leaving it as clear as it was in the beginning. 
This accident we shall largely owe to the stupidity of 
the enemy. Let us consider how he has .dealt with the 
matter to his hand. 
Belgium, he might claim, was but a very modern artifi- 
cial state divided into a Flemish speaking and a Teutonic- 
speaking population, and further divided on the question 
of religion, and yet again divided by the great quarrel 
between the proletariat and the capitalist. The enemy 
has done nothing to take advantage of any of these pointy 
