8 
LAND & WATER 
October 5, 191G 
ARRAS 
is being exercised upon him now at so many points upon 
the huge Hne of the fronts he has elected to defend. It is 
believed or proved, for instance, that he has had 25 or 26 
divisions altogether added to the Galician front since the 
1st of June. He has certainly brought something new — 
ho\V much we do not know— into Transyhania, and he 
has even added a few battalions and must have added a 
great mass of artillery to the forces of his Bulgarian Ally 
to meet the Roumanian threat upon the Danube and 
Dbbrudja. But he cannot be everywhere, and all the 
signs (even a small one such as this would seem to have 
been at Thiepval the other day) of his embarrassment for 
men should be most carefully watched. They are the 
chief indices of our general position in the war. 
Another matter upon which only eye witnesses can 
speak, but upon which there seems to be a fair consensus 
of such witnesses, is the doubtful moral of parts at least 
of the enemy's line during the great attack of ten days 
ago. It would neither be generous nor profitable to 
insist upon the particulaf pieces of evidence that have 
been produced. My readers are acquainted with them 
all. And it would be a very big error in judgment indeed 
to draw general conclusions from any " patchiness " which 
showed itself in the course of that action. What is 
valuable is to compare such occasions with the attitude 
of all the enemy's troops in the earlier part of the action. 
For instance, the correspondents would seem to indicate 
that there was a contrast between the breakdown of the 
counter-attack which was launched from Le Transloy and 
the breakdown of other counter-attacks in the past. The 
French testified to something of the same kind a few days 
before in the counter-attack that broke down in front of 
Bouchavesnes. I only mention the point in passing. I 
know it ought not to be exaggerated, but we are 
told by eye witnesses following the battle that such 
novelties are now occasionally apparent. The official des- 
patches also mention" them and further mention captured 
enemy documents which are corroborative of this style 
of affairs. It would be as much an error to neglect 
such evidence as to over emphasise it. For there docs 
come towards the close of any action simple or complex 
and upon any scale, a moment when the moral attitude 
of the party which ultimately suffers defeat is clearly 
changing. That moment is often misjudged 'by the 
victor. But when the thing is over and the full story 
can be told, we usually discover that a great part of 
success consists in the victorious side having appreciated 
llie approach of this breaking point, not in material or 
in formations, but in state of mind. 
One last rather j)uzzling point in the story of the great 
success which is chiefly associated in the public mind with 
the name of Combles, is the reason the enemy had for main- 
taining his garrison so long in that place. There was, if I 
am not mistaken, something between 24 and 36 hours 
during which the two main communication trenches were 
a\ailable — of course, only under conditions of heavy loss 
-^and the gap or neck through which they passed was still 
something like a mile in width. A certain portion of the 
garrison was, of course, evacuated through these trenches. 
But the situation was so clear that one wonders whether 
the enemy miglit not have saved the very considerable 
number of men who were killed, wounded, or captured 
within the ruins of the little town. Counting the dead 
and wounded with the unwounded prisoners, it looks as 
though he had maintained almost up to the very last 
a force of something like four battalions there, and 
judging by the accounts received the losses inflicted 
upon his opponent at that cost bore no relation to the 
( xpense. I am here again dependent upon the exceed- 
ingly intelligent and vivid account in the Manchester 
Guardian to which I have already referred, where we 
sec the French streaming down the hill from Fregiecourt, 
and the British coming down to meet them from Morval, 
after a fashion very different from the preliminary and 
terrible attacks on Fregiecourt and Morval two days before. 
It reads almost as though when the Allies cut the neck 
of the Combles salient that neck was already atrophied. 
Importance of Achiet le Grand and Bapaume 
That general view of the map which, as was said here 
last week, is now necessary to the following of the Somme 
offensive shows us two points of special interest so far as 
tlie British sector is 'concerned. One is Bapaume ; the 
other is the junction of Achiet le Grand. The corre- 
sponding points of interest before the French front I 
will deal with next week, only mentioning here Velu 
junction which is, as it were, common property to each' 
Ally. 
Bapaume and the junction of Achiet le Grand are both 
of them nodal points of considerable importance in that 
i^oncral threat to the main communications of the enemy 
which is half the meaning of this great action. (The other 
half, of course, and the more important half, is the tre- 
mendous strain it is progressively imposing upon his 
power of resistance as a whole — 'his man-power, his moral ; 
liis production of munitionment ; his power to plan 
movement elsewhere.) 
Upon Bapaume converge nearly all the roads of the 
district. Bapaume threatened, its approaches under 
heavy and continuous fire, means the sending of men and 
supplies round by considerable detours whenever the 
enemy desires to move them from the north towards the 
south of his line. Bapaume occupied means correspond- 
ingly a choice of advance. This consideration has nothing 
like the importance it would have in a war of movement, 
liut it has its importance even in slow siege work. New 
roads have been made by the enemy, of course, especially 
lateral roads, which permit of movement behind Bapaume 
without the necessity of passing through the town. But 
('\ery section of the front bears witness to the burden 
under which an army still is of using these old nodal 
points with their buildings and their hundred other 
ojjport unities. 
To put it in another way : The threat to Bapaume, 
which is now very close and real (at the nearest point X 
on Map V the British are but 4,000 metres range from 
the town), means, even in theory — even suppose the 
enemy to be capable of creating an artificial Bapaume 
as it were, in the plains to the east, a nOvel nodal point 
with its centres of direction and of supply and all the 
rest of it — the transference of a whole organisation and 
of masses of material. It is no more than that, but is 
is as much as that. 
The juiiction of Achiet le Grand like that of Velu is 
of more importance in the scheme of the enemy's defence. 
The enemy has, serving his Somme front, three Hnes 
coming in from his main communications. I have 
marked them in Map V. i, 2 and 3. They are linked 
