February 15, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
hypothesis is tenable and the latter is nut tenable. He 
imght let the truth slip out, but he would not exaggerate 
liis (nvn losses for any eonccivable motive. And that is 
what we mean when we say that the false statements of 
the enemy can always in the long run be tested and 
counter-tested until the truth is bolted out of them : for 
it is impossible even for quick-witted men to co-ordinate 
such a mass of misrepresentation, and the German is not 
quick-witted ; he is painstaking. 
It was in this fashion that we caught him out on the 
inadequacy of his official casualty lists. His various 
statements, private and public, did not tally. His 
national desire to impress his public with the seriousness 
of the task and his national desire to merit the glory of 
heavy sacrilice, led to a mass of evidence which did not 
tally with the official lists, and that mass of evidence 
counter-tested by other forms of intelligence work, gave 
us the true ftgiu-cs of which 1 think by this time every- 
one is convinced. 
It would be imjust to quote the old proverb that 
" liars should have good memories," because there does 
not attach to this kind of deception the moral infamj' of 
falsehood. It is admitted that a belligerent has a perfect 
right to deceive his opponent if he can, particularly upon 
the point of \yastage and recruitment, but what it does 
show is that the organisation of the enemy in this respect is 
as clumsy as it is detailed and methodical, for method and 
detail very often go with clumsiness and lack of rapidity. 
The Element of Surprise 
It is a commonplace of military study that surprise 
is the chief element in military success. It has become 
almost equally a commonplace during the present war to 
say that under its conditions the old factor of surprise 
has been eliminated. 
This is an error due to a too narrow definition of the 
word " surprise " ; for if we examine the various bids for 
immediate success which the two groups have made from 
the beginning we shall find that the element of surprise 
Mas always present in a greater or less degree. 
The strangely silent weeks through which we are 
passing (and wliich we know to be only the preparation 
for tha tremendous shock tliat is to come) are a very 
suitable moment in which to examine this element of 
surprise. It has already been dealt with in the same 
connection by the best of military critics upon the Conti- 
nent, Monsieur Bidou of the Journal dcs Debzts, and I 
do but follow his example in making a similar analysis 
here. 
W'iien people say that the element of surprise has been 
eliminated from modern war or, at any rate, from this 
great campaign, they mean that absolute tactical surprise 
in the old sense has almost been eliminated. Before the 
coming- of aircraft one could conceal movement behind 
any rise of ground and movement at any distance away 
was absolutely concealed whatever the nature of the 
ground. Further, a main element in local or tactical 
surprise is rapidity of movement, and rapidity of move- 
ment is obviously more open to a small body than to a 
large one. The issue of Waterloo was determined by 
surprise. Napoleon was unaware thit the bulk of the 
Prussian army hid retreated n'ortluvard. He thought it 
h vd retreated eastward. Aircraft would have undeceived 
him. The master stroke at Blenheim, though very open, 
was none the less a piece of tactical surprise, for it was 
th : bringing round of the White Cuirassiers (if I remember 
rightly), from the extreme right and th: summoning of 
th;m by Marlborough to the centre that decided the 
rupture of the Franco-Bavarian line. 
Now local or tactical surprise of that sort, save on quite 
a tiny scale, has not been present in this war : First because 
aircraft can discover movements even at a distance, as a 
rule, and can always discover them behind any small 
local obstacle : Secondly, because the very large masses 
of men employed take a long time to concentrate and 
concentration of such bodies cannot be long concealed. 
To these. two main reasons for the elimination of older 
forms of surprise may be added a third wherever the 
lines are immobile. Siege conditions obviously eliminate 
the elements of surprise possible in a war of movement. 
Nevertheless, surprise in a broader sense is, as I have 
said, present to-day. And it is the great interest of the 
yjresent moment that the enemy is bound in his last struggle 
to introduce some element of surprise or, at any rate, to 
try to introduce it. In proportion to his success in this 
respect will be the severity of the linal task before the 
Allies. 
The fact that surprise is ^still possible can be appre- 
ciated from examples : For example, in the winter of 
iqi5 th2 enemy .desired to relieve East Prussia of its 
Russian invaders. The (iermans, therefore, attacked 
\\ith peculiar violence in front of \\'arsaw — deliberately 
sacrificing great numbers of men— and withdrew atten- 
tion from their main objective to the north. That ob- 
jective was the Niemen ; and it will be remembered that 
our Allies suddenly found in front of them a very con- 
siderable concentration in East Prussia, when their 
interest had been concentrated far to the south in front 
of Warsaw. This concentration had been effected far 
behind the front, and had the advantage of greater 
rapidity of movement ; having much better railways 
behind" it. But the chief element in its success was sur- 
prise. 
Tiie first use of gas in the spring of the same ycsx 
in front of the Ypres sector by the enemy was a signal 
example of surprise, though this was accompanied by a 
bad blunder ; for the enemy seems to have treated this 
first disadvantage of gas as an experiment. It was 
apjmrently more successful than he had anticipated as he 
had not made the preparation for following up. The 
consequence was that though a bad gap opened in the 
line, and the left flank of the Canadians was left quite 
unsupported, no practical result was achieved by the 
Germans. 
The co-ordinated use of aircraft with the new lieavy 
siege train at Liege, Namur and Antwerp, was another 
example of surprise effected by a novelty of weapon. It 
was, one may add in passing, the one great permanent 
success which the enemy has had, and the only one, from 
first to last. The Austrian theory and development of the 
heavy siege train, and the combined Austrian and Ger- 
man appreciation of what aerial observation could do in 
combination with such a siege train, made up a wholly 
novel military lesson taught to Europe by the enemy. 
Here again they were more successful even than they had 
expected for, as Colonel Feyler has well pointed out, 
and as is indeed clear from the map. the immediate 
application of this kind of threat to the old fortified frontier 
between Verdun and Belfort would immediately have 
opened a gate into France. As it M'as, the enemy pre- 
ferred to break treaties, and to invade through Belgium 
with the result, rare, but not imknown in history, that 
his political crime proved his military punishment. 
A recent example of surprise with which we are all 
familiar is the use of tanks, and another is the tactical 
method which the French have elaborated. Here 
was a very extreme case of surprise. The French in 
October stiuck suddenly on a few thousand yards of the 
Verdun sector, inflicted extremely heavy losses, recovered 
a wide belt of groimd, did the whole thing in between 
two and three hours, and in unwounded prisoners alone 
took about 5,000 men at an expense in casualties of under 
3,000. The enemy told us upon this occasion that tin; 
element of surprise was largely accidental and depended 
mainly upon a fog. But this was false, for when the 
French tried the method again a few weeks later in per- 
fectly clear weather, it was even more successful. I refer 
to the action which was ironically to commence at the 
same moment as the German overtures for peace were 
known in Paris. It will be remembered that these 
overtures were known in Paris at noon upon the 12th of 
last December. The new French intensive b<mibardment 
in front of Verdun began at that moment ; after not quite 
two hom\s of it the French infantry was launched, took 
a belt about acoupleof miles in width, picked up between 
eleven and twelve thousand i:irisonors, and a lar,ge nnmbir 
of guns and did all this with a loss in casualties less than 
a half, I believ<\ and probably not mucli more than a 
third of the number of able-bodied prisoners alone. 
Both the Verdun and the Trentino offensives had an 
