July 20, 1916 
LAND & W A T E R 
which this front stands from the other two main theatres 
of war involves at once an extension of communications 
which weighs heavily upon an already over-burdened 
State. Austria-Hungary — even if there were no Alps — 
would be compelled to watch, to feed and to supply, to 
evacuate wounded and sick from, and to recruit and send 
drafts to lines not only distant from her other spheres of 
activity, but in a direction which involves communica- 
tions perpendicular to her original communications. 
The original communications of Austria-Hungary, the 
lines upon which her staff had to work out the mainten- 
ance and replenishment of her armies, were the com- 
munications from Easit to West ; the lines through Hun- 
gary from Austria proper and from Germany. The 
Italian front added to these a new set of communications 
running from north to south, and the presence of Italy 
in the war compelled Austria-Hungary to all the complex 
task of a double campaign. It is true that these new 
sets of communications did not directly cross the old 
East and West communications save far back in the 
enemy's territory, and that therefore the worst element 
of confusion which such a situation can create was absent. 
None the less the necessary provision of a new set of lines 
and of all the Staff work connected with their employ- 
ment, the fitting in of their working with the working of 
the older lines at the points of junction, the necessity of 
borrowing rolling stock from one set of communica- 
tions to lend it to the other, the impossibiUty — or what 
was almost the impossibility, of using both at full pressure 
at the same time, put before the Austro-Hungarian com- 
mand new problems which have continued to weigh upon 
them and perhaps to increase in complexity since the 
appearance of Italy upon the side of the Allies rather 
more than a year ago. 
To this point mttst be added the subsidiary one I have 
noted that this new ,front was in the main an Alpine 
front. 
The first remark the reader will make upon this is that 
such a mountain front would seem rather to favour the 
enemy, for it is notorious that a line of that kind can be 
held with far fewer men than a line in open country. 
This is true, and indeed if the new front had been an open 
one it is to be doubted whether Austria-Hungary would 
have had the resources to have held it permanently at 
all. But it is none the less also true that the peculiar 
character of an Alpine front has taxed the enemy very 
heavily. Where he has not been taxed by it in numbers 
he has been taxed by it in the nature of the fighting. 
For this there are tfiree fairly clear reasons. 
In the first place Alpine warfare was to develop— as we 
shall see in later articles — the most unexpected situations 
and to demand new and untried methods of warfare. 
Therefore the enemy had to pit his engineering skill and 
his resourcefulness against the Italians who, as will be 
seen in later articles of this series,, have proved to be 
possessed of a veritable genius for the occupation and 
maintenance of such lines. 
Next, the Alpine conditions of the greater part of the 
front have condemned the enemy to a restricted and 
difficult railway system. He is here much harder hit 
than-are the Italians, for the great mass of the mountains 
lies behind the existing lines and towards the Austrian 
or Hungarian side of them. The Italians have either close 
to their front or actually touching it the abundant railway 
communication of the plains. The Austro-Hunganans 
are tied to one line on the west supplemented by the Ime 
coming in from the Puster, that at F on the accompanymg 
Sketch VII. For- the eastern part of the line, by Gonzia 
and Trieste, they have a better railway system, but even 
here they are handicapped by the mountain defiles to 
the one line from Innsbruck ; through which all their 
supply must pass. 
I shall be told, perhaps, that such a handicap has not 
been hitherto apparent, that the Austrians have main- 
tained themselves with as much facility as our Alhes in 
spite of such apparent drawbacks, and that the pressure 
upon either side has been so similar as to result in a 
situation almost unchanged in the last eleven months ot 
fighting. ... 
The answer to such a criticism will, I think, be laminar 
to all those who have made a study of military history. 
When two opponents are thus in equilibrium— as 
•Arere the Allies on the one side and the French on the other 
for instance, during the summer of lyq.^— the peculiar 
2&untiii.naus . 
Cammunicat'corts- ofAus^o-ZtaZiazi 
disadvantages under which one side may suffer arc not 
apparent. They are potential — they are Teally there 
under the surface, but they are not seen above that sur- 
face. It is in the last stages of a campaign when the 
equilibrium is broken that the effect of such a handicap 
appears and then every one recognises it. 
Wherever it becomes a question of trying to hold the 
Alpine front with just the bare minimum of men upon the 
enemy's side, when anxiety has begun to appear with 
regard to the possibility of reinforcing this and then 
that other threatened point, the power possessed by the 
Italians through their railways upon the plain of moving 
men rapidly back and forth, the corresponding difficulty 
in lateral communication imposed upon the enemy, will 
make itself felt. We have already had a touch of this 
in the very rapid and facile Italian concentration against 
the Austrian Trentino thrust of which I shall speak in 
a later article, 
So much, then, for the way in which the situation and 
character of this particular front has added to the merely 
numerical value of the enemy forces it occupies and with- 
draws from other theatres of war. 
We have next to consider the way in which this ad- 
vantage is further increased for us by the political con- 
ditions of the Dual Monarchy. 
(2) The political effect of the new front, greatly in- 
creasing its merely numerical effect, is twofold. In the 
first place Austria-Hungary, especially in these later 
stages of the war, cannot use its troops indifferently, any 
unit in any place, as can France or England or even the 
German Empire*. 
In the second place the immobilisation of such and such 
a number of Austrian divisions has more effect at the 
present moment than the immobilisation of a similar 
number of German divisions. 
As to the first of these points, it is racial. The Austro- 
Hungarian Empire consists roughly in its population of 
three groups. There are the German speaking Austrians 
(of whom the best troops are probably the Tyrolese) 
there are the Magyars, and there are the various popu- 
lations speaking the Roumanian language and several 
forms of Slav languages. The German speaking popu- 
lation and Magyars proper combined are not quite half 
the whole. Every part of this whole has some complex 
problem of its own involving racial or religious animosities 
of its own. It is conceivable that a successful and rapid 
campaign might ignore such fundamental differences in 
the recruitment of the armies. It is certain that 
military discipline not only covers these fissures with its 
cement but also holds them together with that cement. 
But at the end of a long and increasingly unsuccessful war, 
especially now that the stage of exhaustion is beginning, 
these differences come to be of very real moment, and 
* I say " even the German Empire," because the German Empire 
is not here absolutely free. There is a certain slight but perceptible 
friction between the various parts. If Prussia, for instance, had only 
used Bavarian troops for specially difiicult enterprises, there would 
have been trouble. ' But France or England can use any unit at will 
in any theatre of war, for their services are absolutely homogeneous in 
the field, so far at least as the white troops are concerned. 
