LAND & WATER 
■t)ecombcr 28, iqiG 
iip*>n tho other sido. At any rati-, the judfiiiHiii ua- 
tiiken to lit thost^ arf,'uim'nts afjainst an immediate ami 
conipktc blockailf (whi<h would lia\c involM'd M)nn - 
tlun(< liko the control of jiosverful noutrak, and iiidcid 
of ail Europe as well) prevail. The task was unikrtakeu 
of excluding from the Central Powers by negotiation and 
by gradual steps first one, then another, and at last all 
of the materials necessary to their prosecution of ih'' 
war. 
It Is simply true that that process has now reached a 
point beyond which it cannot be extended. The blockade 
is as full and as severe as we can hope to make it until 
iwlitical conditions shall change and until the last phas • 
of the war shall leave no neutral with any illusion as to 
its outcome. 
The second and more important aspect of tho blockadi.- 
must now Iw considc-red. There has been disappoint- 
nvjnt because the Blockade had not, has not yet had, 
and of its nature can never have certain effects popularl\' 
demanded-of it. 
The Blockade, at its present stage, does not comps.1 
Peace. It does not disarm the Central Poweis and their 
two minor Allies. There is no famine in any but the 
rhetorical use of that word ; there is no one absolutt- 
essential of warfare absolutely lacking. 
But what the blockade docs is to embarrass tho enemy 
very severely, politically and materially, and that em- 
barrassment is increasing and is cumulative. That is the 
value of the bkx-kade and the value is very high. The 
enemy is fed, but he is insufficiently fed, that is true even 
of some portions of his armed forces. He is not in- 
sufikiently munitioned : he has all the main material that 
he requires, but he has to use it under a heavy and an 
increasing strain : poUtically he has been compelled to 
experiments in universal civic control upon the- pattern 
of his univ^-sal military control, and those experiments 
have broken down. The separate political units of 
\\ iiicli his )x>wer is made up may be treated almost as one 
for military purposes. It has proved impossible to treat 
them as one for economic purposes. Prussia has hero 
failed to prove the master. She has had to give way and 
to permit plenty in one quarter and grave distress in 
another. It is in the last phase of the war that this 
crack in her organisation wUl develop. But it is already 
apparent and it is serious. In one jiarticular item, wool, 
that is winter clothing, all the Alliance against us is very 
seriously hit indeed. In crther, the staple food of North 
Germany, potatoes, nature has come to our aid by re- 
stricting the harvest. In a third, fatty matters, a 
dilemma has long appeared Ix'tween their use for food and 
their use for the manufacttire of explosives and lub- 
ricants. The enemy has chosen to lose their value as 
food in some degree amd to safeguard their value as 
material. But he has siaffered a severe strain already 
from that dilemma, and it. is a strain which will neces- 
sarily increase. 
There is anotlier aspect of the blockade which is some- 
times forgotten. It ante-«datcs by many weeks the point 
of exhaustion because the enemy, or at least North Ger- 
many, must consider not only her exhaustion in supplies 
at any particular momeut; but the time that will be re- 
quired to re-stock after 3ier defeat. Were she prepared 
to capitulate to-morrow, it would be some months before 
she could resume, in the mere matter of food, her normal 
life, and two or three before the present strain would 
be relieved at all. In a/her words, she will not relieve 
that strain even at tV moment she capitulates. It 
would only be relieved V)n^' after, and thus the moment 
when the strain can noi lonjicr be born is ante-dated 
2. The Absence of Combined Effort. 
It may first apperir paradoxical to put down as a factor 
against the enemy's position that he " suffers from an 
absence of rombrned effort." We have already said 
that one of his lyceat assets was unity in the direction 
of his effort, or rather singleness therein. But there 
is no paradox. I or the word " single " is the opposite 
of the word " com bincd." By so much as a confederation 
of strong, equal a nd differentiated powers suffers on the 
military side fron 1 the lack of single control it gains if it 
is disciplined and eagerly concerned for a common goal 
in the power of nr mtual co-operation and advice. 
Let me give f .vo examples of this, a negative and a 
positive one. 
The neg'ati\'<j onr i- tli.' Tp^ntir.o ffo-'-'i. Tliat 
breakdown was one ol tin- (.qdial iiii:i>, ni ihe war. It 
was imposed upon the shadowy Anstrian command 
by Berlin. A Prussian staff planned it ; a Prussian 
political direction insisted upon it ; Prussian officers 
even directed its details upon the spot. It was the 
twin brother of Verdun. It is impossible to believe that 
an independent .Austria, a great power which has proved 
itself capable of military success upon its own Hues and 
within its own tradition, would have been consenting to 
such a folly. The Austrian authorities must have known 
— for each natif)n knows its own internal moral an^l 
methods better than another— what i)rice would have to 
be paid, and that price was paid immediately and changed 
the whole face of the war. The price paid was the com- 
plete collapse in Galicia and the loss in one operation of 
800,000 men, half of wliom were actually taken prisoners. 
A disaster of that sort, due to the impotence of one 
member of the .A.Uiance, would have been impossible upon 
our side. Each member of the Alliance has made military 
errors, but none has been able to involve all the others 
directly in the consequences of a misjudgment. 
Now for the positive example. The Alliance has 
elaborated, particularly in the West, a new tactical 
method which will win the war. It n^ached its perfection. 
It was almost created this summer. We saw it rapidly 
increasing in value upon the Somme as the summer 
proceeded. I described it in my last issue. Its char- 
acteristic is the infliction by a local offensive of greater losses 
upon the defence by far than the offensive suffers. We saw- 
it gradualh' coming into play as the Somme operations 
proceeded. It was triumphant at Beaumont Hamel. Wa 
saw it in the two heavy blows which have disengaged the 
Verdun sector, Douaumont and Poivre Hill the other day. 
The mere prisoners taken in these new blows exceeded the 
total casualties suffered in the delivering of them. 
But what was tne moral foundation of that new tactic ? 
Its moral foundation was the fact that the Alliance was 
a combination of talent, method and experience. The 
new method is not the product of one national tradition 
or of one Staff. The English as the French experience 
of air-work, the Italian as well, combined judgments upon 
the new use of artillery and upon new infantry methods 
arrived at this conclusion. Further, not only this, but 
any method thus developed by combined action, spreads 
at once throughout the whole of the Alliance. Something 
done in Picardy is repeated beyond the Isonzo ; a method 
of traction, which we owe to the genius of the Italians, 
supports a concentration of material upon say, some 
sector in France. The Italian field gun itself is but an 
improved 75, and down to the mechanical details of con- 
struction this creative power of combination between 
separate peoples, each with their individual traditions, 
is continuously at work. 
The enemy has none of this. Everything he does is 
Prussian. There has been nothing fundamentally new 
since the Aisne. No one can perceive anything Austrian, 
still less anything Bulgarian or Turkish in the Roumanian 
affair. Tt is the old recipe : When you are certain that 
you have heavier artillery and better munition ment for 
it, blast your way forward, attempt to envelop and fail. 
When yoti have no such superiority, try to blast your 
way forward and fail even at that. 
3. The Exhaustion of Effectives. 
This is far and away the most important point of all. 
It is the determining point of the whole thing. It is the 
w'hole cause of the enemy's present anxiety for peace, and 
if the authorities desire to confirm the public w'ill to 
victory they cannot do better than emphasize it and 
publish it as I do here. 
I have repeated the details so often, and with .so many 
figures, the accuracy of which has increased as evidence 
accumulated, that \ will not weary the reader with a 
further repetition here. 
The central statement is sufficient. For every sixty- 
five men that the enemy now has in action — using 
the word " in action " to mean inclusive of the 
field depots and the zone of the armies, but exclusive 
of the militarily useless men who still draw rations 
and are in uniform at work of one kind or another 
behind the armies — the enemy sees drafts of about 
twenty to supply wastage between this and the late 
part of next summer. It is grossly insufficient. The 
Alliance in every part of it sees " indefinitely larger 
reserves of human material. Even the French people 
