LAND & WATER 
The Dobrudja 
By Hilaire Belloc 
September 14 ,1916 
I 
THE interest of the past week, taking the war as a 
whole, undoubtedly centres in the Dobrudja — 
an open, undulating parallelogram of land about 
100 miles by 200 which lies south of the delta of 
the Danube, and is contained between that river and the 
Black Sea. 
In other theatres of the war much larger forces have 
been engaged ; in the West the capture of Ginchy has 
thrown into conspicuous relief the enemy's inability to 
check the deliberate offensive of the Somme. Some sort 
of junction (very obscurely described) has been effected 
between the Russian troops below the Carpathian crest 
in the Bukowina and certain Roumanian advance 
guards immediately to the south of them. There has 
been very hea\y hghting round the bridges of Halicz 
and Jezupol, and those capital pieces of communication 
have been destroyed. With all this I will deal briefly 
later. But it is the Dobrudja upon which interest centres 
in spite of the fact that comparatively small forces have 
hitherto been in contact here, and in spite of the fact 
that the exigencies of war prevent our having full in- 
formation upon the forces present. 
f At the outset of any study of this region there must be 
repeated what was insisted upon here last week ; the 
plain truth that it is the function of the press not to criticise 
but to explain. Anyone can see upon the map that the 
great avenue of supply which keeps Turkey going and runs 
through Bulgaria, is menaced both from the north and 
from the south. Anybody can see that a Roumanian cam- 
paign from the nOtth, coinciding with an Allied advance 
from the south, is what the map calls for in this region. 
But that map is not a monopoly of the journalist. It 
is far bettor known to the local commands of the enemy 
and of the Allies, let alone to the Higher Commands, 
not only in its large elements but in its smallest details. 
Those whose function it is to follow the events of the 
war and to analyse them cannot determine more than 
one general geographical clement out of the fifty factors 
which determine the judgment of a General on the spot. 
We know nothing of the balance of forces engaged, next 
to nothing of what they have behind them, little of their 
opportunities for advance and for supply. It behoves us 
therefore, merely to describe, to analyse and not to 
judge. ' 
The commanding fact which gi\es to the Dobrudja all its 
importance in this campaign is the fact that the Danube 
