Aiigust 10, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
ill ;»r-. 
The Second Year of the War 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THE second year of the war opened with the 
enemy strongly upon the defensive in the 
West and more than half way through his 
advance across Poland in the East. But, 
much more important than the geographical situation, 
it opened with the enemy still in possession of very large 
reserves of men (the details I shall turn to in a moment ) ; 
while on the West the immense potential numerical 
margin of Great Britain had not yet come into play, and 
on the East, not only equipment for men, but the most 
necessary munitionmcnt was lacking. 
, Ihat second year ends with the enemy partly upon the 
offensive, partly upon the defensive in the West ; upon 
the defensive in the main upon the East, and having 
lost there two belts of territory, the one some 130 miles 
deep, the other some 50 miles. It sees the enemy much 
where he stood before upon the Italian front ; in the 
Balkans very far extended, occupying all Montenegro 
and Serbia, and with the Bulgarian forces as his ally. 
It further sees the attempt upon the Dardanelles ab- 
andoned and the original force in Mesopotamia captive. 
As against this it sees a considerable advance of the 
Russians from the Caucasus, such that they now hold 
the whole of Armenia. 
Were the future student of history to reckon, as do 
some of our contemporaries, by the map, what could he 
make of the contrast ? Nothing at all. He could only 
fell you that the Hue in the West upon the second anni- 
versary of the Declaration of War ran everywhere within 
a few yards of its trace twelve months before. Upon a 
httle sector in front of Verdun it would show an enemy 
crescent gain at the deepest of four miles, feathering down 
to nothing. In the Champagne a similar belt, but less 
deep ; another, smaller in extent, in Picardy, and the 
recent indentation some 15 miles long by five only at its 
deepest point in Picardy would complete the apparently 
trifling story of the change. 
Turning to the East he would see that though the 
recent Russian offensive had gained the salient of Lutsk 
and that of the Bukovina, yet the advance from the 
Vistula which had taken place in the beginning of these 
twelve months much more than compensated for such a 
recent loss, and that the lines as a whole stood at the ex- 
treme point to which the enemy had pushed them when 
his advance was exhausted last autumn. 
Against the Russian occupation of territory in Armenia 
he would set the enemy's in the Balkans. His conclu- 
sion would be no more than a confused idea that upon the 
balance, if anything, the enemy had gained. 
But everyone who is following the realities of the great 
war, from those who merely follow it as students in the 
Press to those who are actually conducting it in the 
Higher Commands of the AlHes and of our opponents, 
knows very well that a calculus of this kind based upon 
the territory held upon the map, is valueless. 
The true basis of judgment is the balance upon either 
side of the principal theatre of war of equipped and fully 
munitioned units. It is the number of men actually 
trained and in the field and provided with all arms ; 
their rate of wastage, their command of increased or 
diminishing munitionmcnt, the rate at which they can 
produce and put into action and feed their chief weapons 
—these are the factors and the only factors that count. 
The enemy is everywhere upon the defensive — a situa- 
tion to which he will make exceptions by attempted 
counter-offensives, but which in its general lines now 
imposes itself upon him. He no longer can count upon 
one portion of that which hems him round lacking in 
munitionmcnt. He no longer can count upon a mainten- 
ance of armies in the field equivalent in number fo his 
opponents, and the whole scheme of the great war re- 
presented as a complex of strains is reversed in August 
1 91 6, from what it was in August, xqi^. The pressure is 
everywhere inwards against the siege fortress of the 
Central Powers. The sortie is everywhere less and less 
probable and less and less fruitful. The points upon 
which attack could be delivered upon the perimeter 
increase indefinitely in number. The strength in equipped 
and munitioned units with which such attacks must be 
met is declining. What was the vast potential reserve 
of British man-power has now become actual. -, The 
corresponding reserve of Russian man-power which 
could not be realised from lack of equipment during so 
many months is now realised at last. The inferiority 
in munitionmcnt has turned to at least an equality which 
is rapidly becoming a superiority upon the part of the 
Allies. And we have clearly entered, no matter what its 
total length may prove to be, the last phase of the Great 
War. Nothing can modify its now fatal quality save 
political disturbances within the group of Powers which, 
when the Central Empires first attacked, were so gravely 
inferior : which have reduced first their numerical, 
later their mechanical inferiority by so laborious a pro- 
cess, but which are now clearly the masters of the game. 
DECISION OF THE MARNE 
Roughly speaking, then, the Great War has passed 
through these phases : 
A First Phase in which the victory of Powers far more 
numerous in the field than their opponents and enjoying 
the advantage of surprise, was morally assured. This 
First Phase was concluded and the ambitions of Prussia 
ruined in the first six weeks of hostilities by the Battle of 
the Marne. Those who said that the Great War when it 
should break out would be a short matter were wrong. 
But the idea underlying that judgment, the idea that some 
decision would rapidly determine what ultimate victory 
was to be, was right. The Marne decided the course^jof 
the war, shaped its destiny, moulded its character. After 
the Marne the vast resoures which Prussia could com- 
mand, her control of armies still enormously superior to 
her opponents and of mechanical resources and provision 
in metal and every other requisite for war more striking 
still, were, in spite of that superiority, doomed. The 
forces Prussia represented and could control were en- 
gaged. And from the 14th of September, 1914, onwards 
nothing could save her save some political accident ; 
a quarrel among her opponents ; a separate peace ; 
a revolution. The mere military factors had become the 
calculable things they always are in a siege, and the end 
was certain. 
There came a Second Phase, in which all the efforts of 
Prussia were centred upon breaking out. Its character- 
istic action was the first Great Battle of Ypres. The 
effort failed. And through the ensuing winter and spring 
two processes went on side by side. The first, the effort 
of the Allies to catch up their grave inferiority in men ; 
the second, the effort of all parties, the Allies and the 
enemy, to provide that enormously increased munition- 
mcnt, particularly of munitionmcnt for the heavy guns, 
which the unexpected character the war had now taken 
on rendered necessary. 
In the first of these tasks the Allied programme was 
completed within the course of the year. The tide in 
numbers had turned before the year was concluded, and 
the Italians joining the Allies in the month of June 1915, 
accentuated this new state of things. But its value which 
— had other things been equal — might have given us 
final success before the close of that year, was modified 
by the inability of one portion of the Allies in an isolated 
and separate field, to keep up with the rate of munition- 
mcnt — the new and unexpected rate — which modern 
war demanded. Though success in the ' West might 
now be finally denied to the Central Powers, the enormous 
discrepancy between the Germanic power of mechanical 
production and that of Russia, gave an opportunity f/or 
separate action towards the East. Prussia, now in con- 
trol of all the forces of the Central Powers, was not slow 
to seize that opportunity, and there followed the great 
