December 21, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
LAND & WATER 
OLD SERJEANTS' INN. LONDON, VV.C 
Telephone HOLBORN 2828. 
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1916 
CONTENTS 
PAGE 
" Wc are Ready for Peace." By Louis Raemaekers i 
German Cry for Peace. (Leader) 3 
The New Victory. By Hilaire Bulloc 4 
" Decav " of Sea Power. By Arthur Pollen 8 
Education and Land. By Christopher Turnor lo 
A Christmas Story. By Emile Cammaerts I2 
Unification of Turkey. By Sir William M. Ramsay 14 
His First Action. By Gerard Shaw 15 
Books to Read. By Lucian Oldershaw 17 
The Golden Triangle. By Maurice Leblanc 18 
Tiie West End * ,24 
Kit and Equipment xi 
GERMAN CRY FOR PEACE 
ON Tuesday the 12th of December, the Chancellor 
of the German Empire announced to the nominal 
Parhament of that State his master's intention 
of suing for peace. Those who have followed the 
war as a wliole, appreciated its character and studied it 
from the only sources worthy of study, understood the 
immense significance of such an event. Li every con- 
ilict of wills that party which begins to plead is the 
party which already envisages defeat. 
Now of such defeat there has never been since the Marae 
and Ypres one shadow of doubt — provided that the Alliance 
against Prussia held firm. The military elements of the 
problem were clear. The Prussian plan had failed. 
It depended upon time for success, and it had missed its 
time table. But the hypothesis of complete unity and 
tenacity upon the part of the Allies, though an hypothesis 
necessarily taken for granted wherever the strategics 
of the war were discussed, was only an hypothesis. Once 
let the unity of the Alliance be shaken, let one member of 
it drop out, and the whole face of the war changes from 
what the Marne and Ypres had done. Petty minds in 
each country may put it in a petty way. Those who are 
• concerned for Europe in peril and for all our past, know 
very well how to put it with truth and completely. With- 
out the British Fleet and the British Industrial system 
the Alliance could be neither munitioned nor fed. With- 
out the French Military strength on the West it could not 
strategically hold — although the French numbers repre- 
sented less than a third of the numbers opposed to us- 
Without the loyalty of our Eastern Allies, which has been 
so magnificently proved, the West would be isolated and 
certainly overwhelmed. No one of the Allies can say : 
" Without our ^•irtues or strength the others would 
have failed." So partial a truth is a falsehood. The truth 
is that without common loyalty all would fail. 
The enemy tried with all his might to separate us. 
He discovered, once the scale of munitionment in 
the present war was apparent, how vast an ad\-an- 
tage he would have upon all the Eastern front in this 
factor. By April 1915 that advantage was developed. 
There followed the tremendous Polish campaign in the 
certitude that it would give him a separate peace upon 
the East. It gave him nothing of the sort. It left him 
where he was upon advanced lines and feeling for the 
first time the })ei-il of c.xliaustion. He tried to forestall 
that peril by the tremendous attack upon Verdun, and 
his theme during the whole of Verdun was: " We are 
bleeding the numerically inferior French Army to death." 
His commentary to Allies and to neutrals all the while 
was : " While the P'rench are thus bleeding rapidly to 
death the English are not, helping." He again failed 
utterly. Then came the Somme. ^Vhcn it was 
clear that the Somme was to be a prolonged offensive 
munitioned upon a larger scale than they had thought 
possible, the commanders of the besieged garrison 
struck a balance of their resources. 
No one can tell in such calculations when the precise 
moment of crack or collapse or retirement will be. It 
usually comes much sooner in reality than it should on 
paper. But, at any rate, it was now calculable. All the 
higher commands saw it just as clearly as did the 
enemy. And Roumania came into the war, with the 
effect which still remains, and should still be clearly 
apparent surely to any educated man, of steadily in- 
creasing the drain upon the enemy and advancing the 
day of his final defeat. Then, in September, the enemy 
asked for peace. He asked for peace secretly. But lie 
asked for it in unmistakable terms and of the Allies iu 
common, for the first time. The proposal was not so 
much as entertained. Three months passed, and it was 
no longer possible for him to keep his population dis. 
ciplined, unless he asked for peace publicly. He has 
asked for it publicly, and it will be refused. \\'c all take 
this last point for granted, and we are right. But we 
should remind ourselves of two things in connec.tion 
with it. 
The first thing is this : Nations do suffer defeat and 
when they are defeated their conquerors enjoy the fruits 
of victory and they themselves suffer the consequences of 
their own undoing. 
There is such a mass of .nonsense talked about this 
obvious point that it is worth repeating. People say : 
" You cannot destroy a nation." They say : " Y'ou 
cannot wipe out the members of a nation " and so on. 
Talk of that kind is entirely beside the mark. What 
you destroy, what you wipe out, is the corporate tradition 
and the spiritual organism which threatened you. What 
you break is a certain will. Y^ou put into the hearts of 
those who had thought themselves your superiors a 
conviction that they are your inferiors. They will not 
threaten you again and, conversely (what is very valuable 
when good is occupied in defeating evil) you, if you are 
the victor, will always feel yourself superior and not 
hesitate to threaten them and to chastise them the 
moment they shall again show the first signs of their 
former pride. That is victory and defeat. The whole 
of history is full of it. The whole story of the human 
race consists in the affirmation through battle of one will 
over another. The conquering will has survived and the 
conquered will has gone under. 
The second point we must bear just as clearly in mind 
is this : It is not enough to make a niihtary calculation 
of numbers or to emphasise against fools the now mani- 
fest superiority we have over our opponents. It is 
necessary . also to maintain to the very end the full 
strength, that is, the full moral strength of that com- 
bination which is at work against Prussia. Wc have not, 
as Prussia has, a single will, a single centre, and a single 
command. It is not in the nature of our institutions in 
the West, France, England or Italy, to terrify the Press or 
private citizens into silence. We depend upon self. 
made laws and our traditions of liberty, and we must use 
them for unity until, quite a few months hence now, the 
end is achieved. 
But this end does not consist in certain terms which we 
are now prepared to state, nor in any scheme for tlie 
sparing in this or that degree of the enemy. The end 
which wc are now approaching is Complete Military 
Victory, and only when that is achieved will the opinion 
of free men tolerate the discussion of further matters 
consequent upon such success. 
