July 6, 191b 
LAND & WATER 
third critical phase, which may very well be determinant 
of the war, and which will almost certainly j^ive it at 
any rate its final form, is modified more and more, and 
more and more in our final power, by the very fact that 
:he Germans have chosen to continue upon the; Mouse 
md cannot help continuing upon the Meuse. 
Meanwhile that phase has been led up to elsewhere 
by three closely connected events — the eneiny blunder in 
Italy, the Russian stroke upon the Galician border and 
the immobility of Hindenburg in the northern part of 
the eastern line. 
All these three subsidiary phenomena of the moment, 
all these three forerunners of the critical pliase just upon 
us, hang together. 
A Political Illusion 
It is the great extension of the enemy's front through 
tvhat fools have called his " conquest," through his 
crying to combine the poUtical illusion of occupied 
territory with the hard realities of military science that 
led to the breakdown of the Austrian army between the 
marshes of Roumania. He had to hold that extended 
line with a minimum of men. He had told the whole 
world — and particularly the American journalists, who 
are his chief heralds in the matter— that the Eastern 
line was " impregnable." The phrase is of course abso- 
lutely meaningless as it stands. What it would mean if 
it were properly expanded would be something like this. 
" The Russians are so disorganised by our advance last 
year, by their great losses, my system of defence is so 
marvellous that I can hold the front between the Pripet 
marshes and the Roumanian frontier with only forty-five 
divisions. I am quite secure there until I have done my 
work elsewhere and choose to return eastward. Or, at 
the very least I can when terms of peace are proposed find 
myself in the same situation in the East." 
"We have seen the folly of this contention. The 
. 45 divisions (there may have been 47. Some have 
stated, with the addition of certain German units, 49) 
represented, in the condition in which the Russians found 
them at the beginning of June, about three-quarters of a 
million men in line. The Russians struck upon June 4th. 
By June i8th, a fortnight later, at least one-half of that 
great force had disappeared. And all over its ruins, 
deeper in one place, shallower in another, an attack 
ruinously expensive in men would still be directed against 
the enemy. 
The position of the German line on the north-eastern 
front was again exactly dependent upon the extension 
of front to which the enemy had condemned himself. ■ 
That extension of front did not only mean an immense 
extension of the actual line to be held (it is over 300 miles 
in all its sinuosities from the marshes to the Baltic, which 
Hindenburg has now to survey. It is but 170 miles 
from Warsaw to the Save) it also means an extension of 
communications through very bad land indeed. 
I will not exaggerate the importance of such an exten- 
sion in modern war. We are not dealing with the roads 
of the Napoleonic, or even the Russo-Turkish wars. 
Existing railwavs vastly modify the problem, the power 
of rapidly laying down light railways modifies it. The 
establishment of provisional roads modifies it further, as 
does petrol traffic modify it. Nevertheless it is, even 
under modern conditions, quite a different thing to hold 
a line through the Polish forests and marshes over 100 
miles from the railheads of the full German railway 
system than to hold a line upon those railheads through 
the developed country of East Prussia and its borders. 
It was even a different thing to hold a line through 
Volhynia, though here the Austrians were much nearer 
their original railheads and railway system, than it would 
have been to hold one in Galicia with its network of roads 
^"whether Hindenburg's men would have stood against 
a Russian attack had a Russian attack been delivered 
there we cannot tell, but we do cleariy see in the present 
sSion that that line was reduced in the present summer 
to its bare minimum of men. u ^v,^ 
The reserves that might have swelled ^ts numbers, the 
depots from which losses in case of an advance uould 
Ke been made good, were all -t -estwanls wh^n the 
nrenaration of Verdun determined the enemy to mcrease 
hL forces upon the West in such a prodigious fashion and 
to make what had been <)0 divisions no less than 125. 
Upon that northern frtint some months ago the (iermans 
could have poured rapidly by their lateral railway 
reinforcements in aid ui the shattered Austrians in the 
south. It would have been more consonant with their 
policy, it would have been an exact replica of what they 
have done twice before to meet the southern attack by a 
counter-attack in the north immediately following. 
The least informed of our commentators believed 
indeed that that attack was actually taking plaie when 
Hindenburg " felt " his o|)ponent in the first days of the 
Austrian disaster. Had they considered for a moment 
they would have seen that he could not in his exhausted 
condition effect any considerable counter-stroke. At the 
best it would be a matter of weeks before he could 
be reinforced. 
When we turn to the third of the subsidiary devices 
(for all are really subsidiary to the West) we can see how 
the whole is connected, although this Austrian attack in 
the Trentino has rather a moral connection than a material 
one with the rest. The attack on the Trentino is simply 
another Verdun. As I said last week, the conception 
that it was disliked in Berlin is nonsense. It has every 
mark of being actually ordered from Berlin. The same 
type of preparation, the same type of initial assault, and, 
one may add, the same result. In the Trentino was 
massed at the end of the bottle neck absolutely every- 
thing that Austria had to spare. And the machine will 
not work backwards. The Austrian effort in the Trentino 
must continue. It has no choice. If it has run up 
against an unexpetced resistance exactly as the (iermans 
did at Verdun, if it continue to show a corresponding 
loss ; if it have nothing to show by either of these efforts, 
save the result of the first few days (exactly as at Verdun) , 
so much the worse for the Austrian Higher Commiand. 
They have left themselves no alternative choice. They 
must continue in the hope that sooner or later and at 
whatever expense of men, the plains may be securely 
reached and the main Italian communications menaced. 
They have, it is true, a clear military objective before 
them, while the (iermans at Verdun had nothing of the 
sort. Were the Germans occupying the whole of Verdun 
town to-morrow they would not be advanced by one inch 
or one hour towards victory. If the Austrians were 
in Vicenza or Verona they would achieve a very great 
result, and they would have imperilled the whole of the 
main Italian army in the East. But there is no sign of 
that army falling in such a peril or believing it to be 
imminent, and the futility of the continued offensive 
in the Trentino still closely parallels the futility of the 
massed attacks upon the heights of the Meuse above the 
Verdun valley. 
For the rest, Bulgaria can do nothing, for Salonika 
has checkmated all that. Every conception of action 
through 'the East has been similarly checkmated, and 
there remains only the issue of the great attack which 
has just been launched in the West. 
The Younger German Recruitment 
There is still no direct information, but only rumour, 
\vith regard to the calling out or even warning of the 
German igi8 class, but there is now ample evidence to 
hand of the prisoners of i()i7 class in the field. Numerous 
members of this class are among the prisoners captured 
by the French in front of Verdun. 
We must not believe that the greater part of it has yet 
left the depots. It is probably in much the same situa- 
tion that the 1916 class was last April. 
The ir)i6 class had then appeared in the field for about 
a month and was already furnishing prisoners — about 
April it was numerous. The 19 17 class is not yet as 
numerous in the field, it will probably be so about July. 
In other words — as we might expect — three months is 
about the time which brings one class on to the heels of 
another. Another way of saying it is that the enemy's 
wastage is about four times as rapid as the enemy recruit- 
ment ; or perhaps a little IcsS' — for we must always allow 
for the balance of the younger classes which is at first 
sent back as unfit, but later can rejoin. 
I wonder whether, when 19 18 is in the field, our 
Germanophiles will still believe that the enemy has a 
vast army of mature men in reser^'e for what they describe 
as a " coup-de-grace " ? H. Belloc 
