6 
LAND & WATER 
November 30, 1916 
jquallj' hidden from us and almost equally important, 
and that is the factor of intelligence. If the enemy, who 
certainly has very great superiority in aircraft, knows 
thoroughly in what situation his opponent stands for 
munitionment and s\ipply, then his present action, based 
upon such intelligence, is a mark of very grave events, 
so far as Rouniania is concerned, in the near future. 
That goes without saying. And I think that those who 
pointed out the peril of the Austro-German march on 
such thin communications rapidly down south on to 
Craiova neglected this element. I mean that such a 
march would not have been undertaken unless they had 
Known, or thought they knew, how long it would be before 
any sufficient resistance could be put up. 
If — which is rather too much to hope for upon the 
Roumanian front — the enemy's intelligence is faulty 
and munitionment is coming in sufficient amount before 
he is prepared, then and themonly will he find matters 
in danger. Mere judgment from the map and from 
present positions is worthless until this vital question 
of the proportion of munitionment is answered. And we 
have no answer to it. 
There is one final point that must be made. The 
question of the re-provisioning of the enemy by his entry 
into Roumania. It has been exaggerated. The stores 
of Roumanian corn, the possession of the Roumanian oil- 
fields, should he obtain any considerable portion of the 
first and, as looks likelj', most of the other, will give the 
enemy strength and will relieve his present embarrass- 
ment. But it does not weigh in the general fortunes of 
the war against the main point, whether this big move- 
ment shall prove disastrous to him in nunibci-s or no. 
The embarrassment for corn and for petroleum did no 
more than hamper the enemy. It was always folly to 
think that such embarrassment alone could bring the war 
to a conclusion. Nothing could have worked powerfully 
towards that end but a complete blockade from the 
beginimig, and especially from the beginning a blockade 
of cotton. It was from fear, as we know, that such action 
would have military results too grave for us to risk them, 
that a complete blockade was not midertaken. It is 
(luite certain that since the harvest of 1915, and since 
the time afforded for the production of other propcUant 
explosives, the blockade is but subsidiary to the main 
element of success, which is the wastage of the enemy's 
numbers. 
We shall do well during the remaining few days of this 
critical passage in the eastern field, to remark that it 
corresponds to nothing hitherto apparent in the war. 
It does not resemble the Russian retreat of eighteen 
months ago, for it is hot a series of actii n - involving heavy 
losses upon both sides. It does not resemble the retreat 
from Charleroi in 1914 on which followed the Battle of ih^ 
Mame. It is the rapid retirement, witho-ut action and 
mthout loss, of one army before another. It is the refus-. 
ing of action by an army lacking supply and its retirement 
to some line on which it expects supply. \Mien we have 
the enemy speaking of a whole cavalry division meeting 
and following a whole cavalry division of the Roumanians, 
when we have a' complete absence of loss in guns and 
prisoners, and when we have marches of something like 
20 miles a day, it is perfectly clear that we are dealing with 
a retirement to some line upon which it is hoped or known 
that a sufficient munitionment is prepared, and until the 
shock has taken place upon that fine we can only wait. 
As for the httle force which was holding the Iron Gates 
at Orsova, it has defended itself but it is cut off, and 
communication by the Danube is not only open to the 
enemy, but has been so far taken advantage of that the 
left bank from the Iron Gates to the point at which 
Mackenscn crosses, is with its supplies and its barges and 
tugs in the hands of the enemy. H P>m 10c 
Mr. Balfour's Dilemma 
By Arthur Pollen 
IT is now well over a month since it became known 
that changes were in contemplation in different de- 
partments oi the Higiier Command of the navy. 
It was understood that these would include 
changes in the Board and in the staff, and that the re- 
shuiiung would invoh e changes in the commands afloat. 
It is not the kind of crisis in wliich discussions in Parlia- 
ment and the press can assist very much. It has, there- 
fore, been chstinctly unfortunate that a recognition by the 
Government of the necessity of these changes has coincided 
with such unmistakable signs first, that in some im- 
portant respects the naval war is developing along new 
lines — for which we seem unprepared — next, that the 
Admiralty organisation has been quite unequal to its 
duties in certain important matters. This coincidence 
has encouraged a press campaign, directed personally 
against Mr. Balfour, in wliich a very laboured emphasis 
is laid upon his age and a reputed aversion from active 
intervention in naval affairs. For two reasons this 
attack seems misdirected and ill-timed. Fu'st, it is quite 
imnecessary to assume that Mr. Balfour's non-inter- 
ference with his naval colleagues must arise from senile 
lethargy, when a more obvious explanation of it is to 
hand ; and next, assume everyone is agreed on the 
importance of readjusting the various naval appoint- 
ments, it is curious that it should not also be recognised 
that the task is necessarily dehcate and difficult, and that 
it is not likely to be solved in the most satisfactory 
of ways in a period of public controversy and agitation. 
Whether we regard the conduct of the naval war as falling 
entirely upon Mr. Balfour, or upon the Government that 
must endorse his action or choose a successor, it is a matter 
far too momentous to the fortunes of the war for it to be 
wise to endanger cl(!ar thinking and firm and impartial 
action by exciting p ersonal animosities and resentment. 
At the time of writing nothing whatever is known of 
the new appointmen ts, and many of the rumours are 
incredible. The princ nples at issue are worth discussing. 
\\Tien more than a year ago I urged that important 
readjustments might bi ; made in the Higher Command, my 
reasons briefly were, that war had shown our preparation 
in general to have been utterly inadequate, and tiiat we 
ought no longer to ignore the lessons war had taught us. 
These lessons had been given to us lavishly and in many 
fields. That we had been utterly unprepared to meet 
the most obvious of all the menaces that the submarine 
created was shown by the almost incredible fact that 
our fleet bases were unprotected against under-water 
attack. Deficiencies in mines, in • minelaying craft and 
in an organisation for defeating the nrinelaying of the 
enem}^ had all been notorious from the first. Only the 
fact that oiu- intervention in the war took Germany by 
surprise explains how it was that she had less than a 
dozen and a half surface ships prepared to attack our 
ocean trade. Had they been more numerous our cruiser 
force would have been utterly inadequate to bring them 
to book, and as it was, the damage this handful of ships 
did ran to many milUons of pounds. Far more important 
than any of these omissions was the failure to equip the 
fleet with the means of using the ships' artillery in the 
conditions of action which torpedo developments, as had 
long since been recognised, made inevitable. Our ex- 
periences in the actions in which torpedoes did not figure 
—take conspicuously the encounter between Sturdee 
and Von Spce — had shown to what a pass gun-power woifld 
be brought, if the enemy's torpedoes could impose 
additional manoeuvres upon the firing sliip. The affair 
of the Dogger Bank bore out the lessons of the Falkland 
Islands, and pointed the moral. But Mr. Churchill's 
second board learned nothing from these experiences. 
Instead of preparing the fleet with the means for securing 
victory, if the opportunity of victory offered, it started 
incontinently to build dozens of monitors that must be 
quite useless for the mairi purpose for which fleets exist, 
and a further programme of ships, the designs of which 
were decided upon without consultation with those to 
whom such experience of war as then existed had fallen. 
The escape of the German cruisers in January 1915 seemed 
already a high price to pay for our failure to bring the 
method of using the navy's principal wcn;^on, the gun. 
