8 
LAND & WATER 
September 28, 1916 
It has no road whereby lull supply can be kept up. The 
SaiUisel road is directly under French fire, at a range of 
a few yards, the Morval road has gone, and the hollow 
in which it lies is dominated everywhere by the Allies. 
It remains to be seen whether the garrison will at once 
after such a setback fall back or will be sacrificed as 
was that of Souchez over a year ago. More interesting 
still will be the power the enemy may have in this 
field to react after he has lost the Combles salient. It 
is clearly his business to strike. But he has been slow 
in reacting lately. Whether his hesitation to counter- 
attack is due to the strain upon his effectives or the mur- 
derous result of his recent failures we do not know. It has 
been very pronounced oi late, and it will be a fairly good 
test of his present position upon the Anglo-French centre 
to see whether his counter-stroke can come at once or no. 
24 hours is enough to judge by, 48 is ample. 
It is advisable, now that the rate of advance has 
become so pronounced and its succession so methodical, 
for the general reader to look further afield than the 
lines on the Somme, and to see how the whole situation 
looks on a map, including Arras, Cambrai, Noyon, Roye, 
Soissons. Let him note the position of Bapaume : 
the railway knot of Cambrai beyond, the St. Quentinline 
and the relative position of the Roye and Noyon salient : 
soon the interest will extend to that wide field. 
The Enemy Press 
The enemy Press makes very interesting reading in 
this crisis of the war, and the numerous extracts of it 
printed in our daily papers do not, I think, always give 
the truest or the most important of the various impres- 
sions it conveys. 
If I were asked what that truest impression was I 
should say, after co-ordinating a considerable numbei" of 
articles and pamphlets intended both for neutral and 
for domestic consumption, that the chief element at pre- 
sent was nervousness : By which term I do not mean 
timidity but a sort of unbalancing of the judgment pro- 
duced by an overstrain upon the ner\es. It .shows itself 
in the form of sentimentality upon the one side, and in- 
coherent statements upon the other. It shows itself, 
for instance, in the most astonishing sensitiveness to 
civilian suffering on account of the war within the Central 
Empires, and in definite statements with regard to the 
military position which do not hang together and which 
are often simply foolish. 
The matter distributed, for example, to neutral coun- 
tries with regard to the attacks from the air upon German 
towns is sentimental and also violent after a fashion not 
to be found in the Allied Press. There is a shriek nuining 
through it all against the abomination of killing defence- 
less people, and a special emphasis is laid, of course, upon 
the death of women or children. The following phrase, 
which I quote textually from an official pronouncement, 
is illuminating : 
"Mothers gave vent to the most lamentable cries of 
despair as they wandered among the horribly mutilated 
corpses seeking their unfortunate children. One had 
lost her only son ; another three young boys. The pro- 
found grief with which we are filled by such a massacre and 
our profound compassion for the victims only nourishes 
our determination to achieve victory. Our enemies 
may boast if they will at having caused the cruel death 
of 117 defenceless people: certain of the bombs fell near 
the Royal Palace, but the greater number in the main 
square, which but a few moments before had been filled 
with the happy murmur of an innocent crowd." 
And so forth. 
To write in this fashion when one has oneself originated 
the method of warfare described, when one has boasted 
of being the first in the field, when one has written whole 
encyclopa;dias to show that such methods are legitimate 
and of indirect military value, and when one has ex- 
plained a hundred times that they are a natural concom- 
mitant of modern hostilities, because the old international 
decencies of Christendom are dead, may properly be called 
nervousness. It is shrieking ; it is losing one's -balance. 
I have seen it suggested in some quarters that the 
foolish outcry against the severity of the Allied bombard- 
ment and the protest against the Allied ingenuity in 
tactical novelties was something exceptional and not 
fairly representative of the enemy's Press. This is an 
error. The enemy's Press as a whole writes theatrically 
and excitedly about the nature of the Somme offensive. 
It commonly uses phrases such as " butchery " ; " mur- 
der " ; " not true warfare " and the rest of it. To write 
so connotes a state of public opinion which seems, to' an 
outsider at least, to have lost balance. That press is 
also "jumpy" on the point of the AlHes military 
superiority. Thus the Frankfort Gazette : " The feeling 
of impotence in face of the enemy's methods of air recon- 
naissance is exasperating." The New Free Press of 
Vienna : *' This is not war. it is extermination," and again : 
" // seems as though the Allies acted from a lust for killing, 
one would say the Anglo-French Governments had deter- 
mined to kill Germans at such and such a rate per month." 
If we turn to the pronouncements made upon the 
military position, the attitude of mind betrayed is equally 
abnormal. Let me again quote textually : 
" One of the offensive operations we have undertaken " 
(and this is again from an official pronouncement and not 
from a chance ill-informed article), " has been at work for 
now quite a lengthy period. It is the attack against the 
French positions round Verdun. The course of thir, 
operation is methodic and implacable, undoing one after 
the other each effort of the enemy to escape from the 
stranglehold which is crushing him. The slow disin- 
tegration of the French Army at this point proceeds with 
pitiless logic." 
I think it is fair to maintain that such a description of 
the present actions round Verdun is unbalanced. Here is 
another, equally official. It begins thus : 
" The Austro-Hungarian troops succeeded in driving 
the Italians from the Southern Tyrol and even in crossing 
the Italian frontier over a large front, to the very edge 
of the slopes juhich border the Italian Plain." 
That is quite true, but then we go on to read : 
" On account of considerations which related to the 
general military position, and in order to make certain 
of complete strategic liberty, the .iustrians then shortened 
their front." One does seriously ai-k oneself for what sort 
of audience things of this kind are written. The Austrian 
offensive in the Trentino was a lamentable strategic 
error : stupid, ill-considered, exceedingly expensive and 
futile. None of those adjectives are exaggerated. It 
was ordered in every detail from Berlin. It was over- 
looked by Prussian officers who accompanied their un- 
fortunate Allies right down into the organisation of every 
brigade and even, in some cases, . regimental units. It 
had for its enormous consequence the destruction of the 
Austrian front between the Pripet Marshes and the 
Roumanian Border ; the loss in some eight weeks of 
some 800,000 effectives in that field alone and the change 
of the whole war from what it was last May to what it 
was when the Allies began their attack upon the Somme 
on the 1st of July : That is from a siege still capable of 
vigorous reaction to a siege purely dcfensixe. It brought 
in Roumania ; it led to a state of affairs in which the 
general initiative passed everywhere into the hands of the 
opponent. To describe a monumental thing of that kind 
with such phrases as those I have quoted, may fairly 
be called unbalanced. 
It is when one sees official writing of that kind de- 
liberately ordered, corrected and dis.stminatcd by the 
German Government that one understands eccentric 
examples more commonly quoted, such as that famous 
telegram about Mackensen's advance in the Dobrudja 
twice alluded to above in this article. 
There is plenty more of the same sort. But I think the 
most striking example I have yet met with is the follow- 
ing Calendar of the great Battle on the Somme. It is 
officially drawn up in Germany, published in various 
languages (I have before me the version in excellent 
French) and solemnly distributed to the patient German 
public and to neutrals. 
" July 2nA.— The Anglo-French offensive obtained, 
generally speakmg. no success north of the Somme. South 
of the Somme divisions were withdrawn to certain posi^ 
ttons and then retired to othe r positions" 
