LAND 5: WATER 
July 6, 1916 
refused to reply to this tremendous hammering (wherein 
the enemy spent himself so lavislily) and maintained a 
political discipline which has very probably determined 
the issue of the war. Though there were isolated ex- 
amples, rather in the press than in the public of anxiety 
and even of folly during the strain, yet the strain was 
endured. 
The menacing of the combined fronts has but begun. 
What developments the immediate future will show we 
cannot tell, but the essential point for opinion to bear 
in mind is that the operation will be long and detailed 
and there will be no question of any one or two violent 
pliensive operations destined immediately to achieve 
their result or fail as was the model of the first greal 
offensive in this war. Still less is there any question on 
the Allied side of massed and destructi\'ely expensive 
effort upon one selected sector. Verdun has been a 
suflftcient object-lesson in that, and the enemy has proved 
it for us. 
The poHcy now deliberately undertaken and to be 
carried through is a prolonged general and deliberate 
poUcy, the separate parts of which will appear 
upon point after point of the long fronts attacked, 
and the object of which is the full use of what is now 
a great superiority in men and at least an equality 
in munitions. 
A General Review of the Situation 
A T the moment in which these lines are written 
/\ the third critical phase of the war is opening. 
/ % The first was the initial phase which concluded 
U, JLwitb the Marne and the Battle of Ypres' and 
decided the simple truth that if no further political 
factors came in upon the enemy's side, or endeavour 
came in to weaken the Atiance against him by fatigue 
or quarrel, he would inevitably lose the war. 
This initial phase will aertainly appear to the future 
historian the most important of all. The historian of 
1812, for instance, does nat lay chief stress upon the 
horrors of the Retreat from Moscow, and as for the 
brilliancy of the attack on Bo rodino —which seemed at the 
moment of such vast importance to the French them- 
selves as well as to their enemies, puts it altogether into 
the background. What he emphasises (and you may 
see it in every competent writer upon 1812) is the 
initial blunder of entering with so vast a force, with 
such conditions of transport and upon so few avenues 
of approach, a country of which the French Higher 
Command was at bottom ignorant. 
\e.xt and later the historian of 1812 emphasises the 
undue delay of Napoleon at Moscow. But if his interest 
is in strategy, as it should be, he is likely to debate at 
greater length than the delay at Moscow the question 
of whether Napoleon would not have done well to halt 
in Smolensk. 
It is the same with the present war. 
It is not the dramatic final actions which perhaps, 
when they come, will quite eclipse all the rest for vivid- 
ness and for decision, certainly in the long swaying of 
the trench lines during the central period, but this initial 
phase which will arrest his pen, and upon it will he make 
turn the whole nature of the great war. 
His reasons for doing so will be that he will have, 
as the contemporary public cannot fully have, though it 
gains rapidly in construction, a conspectus of the forces 
at work. He will appreciate the fact that the Central 
Empires combined were, in August, 1914, humanly 
certain of victory and of rapid victory at that. They 
were overwhelmingly more numerous. They had chosen 
their own moment. They had prepared and they pos- 
sessed the equipment for the munitionment of modern 
war upon a scale far superior to that of their opponents. 
That they failed was due to a strategic blunder of the 
first class, a blunder comparable to Erlon's blunder two 
days before Waterloo. They totally misconceived the 
proportionate grouping of the French lines between the 
V^osges and Paris, and they suffered the defeat of the 
Marne. There still remained to them the opportunity of 
occup3dng the ports of the Channel when they had rallied 
after their defeat for turning the far inferior Allied hne 
by the open gap that was left. They blundered again, 
or at any rate they delayed, then when they tried to 
force the gate they lost the battle of Ypres and the first 
phase of the war was over. 
They lost the battle of Ypres from a complete miscal- 
culation of the strength of the modern defensive, coupled 
with the characteristic ignorance of the type of soldier 
they had to meet. For the success at Ypres was not 
merely the result of a Wind formula " the strength of the 
modern defensive," it was much more the result of certain 
moral qualities in the defending force, which enabled 
them to exhaust the enemy's attack at a moment when 
they were still so small in number and still in process -of 
organisatioo. 
The second critical moment of the war was the beginning 
of last summer. There had by that time clearly appeared 
to all the belligerents what not one of them guessed when 
the war broke out, the character which modern trench 
warfare would exhibit. 
Everyone had been caught short in heavy munition- 
ment, but the unexpected accident turned greatly to the 
profit of the enemy because he had, for totally different 
reasons, provided himself with a much larger proportion 
of heavy pieces and with the machinery for their munition- 
ment. This end of the spring or beginning of summer 
last year is critical because upon its fortunes would depend 
the duration of the war. The matter was argued at 
some length in these pages, and the conclusion was arrived 
at which the future showed to be just. The great 
offensive would be undertaken with the opening of the tine 
season, if that offensive were launched in the West, which 
had been creeping up in munitionment and in men, and 
if it were successful the war would be of short duration. 
Should such an offensive be forestalled by the enemy, or 
when undertaken, fail, the war would be of long duration. 
Its ultimate issue still remained clear so long as no new 
political development came to weaken the Alliance or to 
strengthen the enemy. 
The enemy took advantage of the immense dispropor- 
tion between his power of munitionment and that of the 
Russians. He still had advantage in this matter over 
the Western Allies (though he has since lost it, for those 
who say that the curve of his increasing munitionment 
is steeper than that of the Western Allies at the present 
moment are ill-informed) but he had a much greater 
advantage of course over long industrialised Russia. He 
seized that advantage, broke the Russian lines at Dunajetz 
and proceeded throughout the summer of 1915 to advance 
through Poland, forcing salient after salient upon the 
Russians, in the hope of achieving a decision against them, 
of obtaining a separate peace from them or, alternatively, 
leaving them negligible for the rest of the war, and then 
coming back in full force next year against the West. 
He failed to achieve his end. Bui he had forestalled any 
offensive against himself and he had prolonged the war 
greatly to his moral and political advantage, for though 
the numbers in the West would continue to increase 
against him and the power of munitionment in thfe West 
would also increase, yet he might gamble upon the effect 
of time in wearj'ing his opponents and in affecting, what 
is always somewhat imperfect, the co-ordination of the 
separate Allied forces and their commands. 
Relying upon such factors he pursued his efforts 
throughout the autumn and obtained, when his assault 
upon Russia was exhausted, the first grave political 
change in his own favour, the adhesion of a neutral — 
Bulgaria. He overran Serbia and Montenegro, for a 
moment threatening the general communications of the 
British Empire, was baulked in this by the counter-stroke 
of Salonika and then almost with the opening of the next 
year decided upon a certain effort in the ,West, which was 
his last hope, but which offered him the chance of very 
considerable results. He decided to mass against a 
particular sector of the western line just such striking 
forces as had been his work seven months before upon the 
Dunajetz. With this difference, however, that the strik- 
ing force he was ready to launch in this last attempt was 
stronger by far in heavy artillery and its munitionment 
than anything he had yet been able to put forward. 
The sector which he chose for this last great effort 
