LAND & WATER 
March 29, 1917 
this western work had been rapidly and thoroughly 
accomplistied. 
The Prussian Government had been warned by a 
responsible English statesman visiting its Court a few 
years before, that any plan of this sort, if it were carried 
into action, would necessarily involve hostilities with 
Great Britain, it did not believe, however, that Great 
Britain, when the test came, would enter the war. 
The grounds of tliis misjudgment vs'ere manifold. It 
took seriously the mere conventional play of English 
parliamentary parties. It grossly exaggerated the real 
divisions of English pohtical opinion ; it quite under- 
estimated the homogeneity of British national senti- 
ment ; it somewhat overestimated the considerable 
forces, economic and pohtical, which would refuse any 
foreign adventure. 
But above all, it relied upon a certain factor in the 
business which was really present and which might indeed 
have affected the issue disastrously for this country, 
and advantageously for her enemies. This factor was 
the remoteness of the whole British tradition, experience, 
intention and outlook from the vast business of a modern 
Continental war. 
British Military Organisation 
Prussia certainly counted opon the shock of so enor- 
mous a demand, so utterly novel and so perilous, more 
than she did upon any other element in the affair. The 
British army was upon a wholly different scale and 
enjoyed a wholly difterent tradition and organisation 
from those of the Continental conscript Powers. It had 
only recently been provided with any machinery for an 
Expeditionary Force, and even that upon a scale 
of no more than six divisions. Six divisions is not 
one-fortieth of what the German Empire alone has now 
in the field. There could, apparently, be no question of 
serious miUtary interference by such a Power. 
Prussia not only appreciated, these truths in the summer 
of 1914, she had digested them so thoroughly that she 
continued to think in such terms long after those truths 
had ceased to be true at all. To this day her attitude; 
towards British mihtary power is something Uke that of a 
man who, firmly convinced there are no such things as 
ghosts, has the misfortime to be haunted. 
To return to 1914. While Prussia was thus calculating 
upon the inertia which always trammels a man or a 
nation in the face of some stupendous and quite novel 
peril, she fully appreciated what the entry of the British 
Fleet would mean, and to this must be ascribed the 
violent revulsion of feeUng which her statesmen suffered 
when they discovered that the violation of Belgium — 
to put it upon the most material grounds, the threat it 
involved to the coast of the Low Countries — would bring 
Great Britain into the lists against them. 
Nevertheless, even under such an ultimate menace 
Prussia could calculate upon victory. The immediate 
effect of Great Britain's entry, the vmexpected formation 
of the ^yESTERN Alliance, would seem to be no more 
than this : It would restrict Germany and Austria's 
power of import, but the accumulation of material was 
ample for the expected duration of the war ; internal 
resources were greater than those of any other national 
group, and there was a formidable combination of neutral 
interests which would forbid any immediately strict 
blockade. It would be impossible for Germany to 
cut the communication between France and her Colonies 
but the recruiting field France enjoyed there would take 
some time to come into play, and would be of very httle 
service if any in the critical first weeks in which the war 
would certainly be won. The modern use of mines would 
render the actual coast of Germany secure, and the ship- 
ping, military and civil, within German ports. In a 
word, the immediate effects of this unexpected menace 
would not materially influence (it was imagined) a short, 
decisive campaign, such as that which had been planned 
and confidently discounted. 
But every military command, even the most arrogant, 
has always m its mind alternative plans. Had it not 
it would not merit the title of military command at all. 
And It was apparent to the enemy that the entry of the 
British fleet into the game would, if anything in the 
apparently certain calculation went wrong, and if the 
war should prove not short but protracted, involve very 
serious consequences. France would thus acquire for 
her support coal, steel, uninterrupted import by sea 
from neutral markets and such economic advantage as a 
restricted but continuous commerce could supply. In 
what degree time might produce a stricter blockade 
no one could say ; it was perhaps a vague menace, but 
it was a menace all the same. Finally, though it was not 
beheved that Great Britain would be capable of jpro- 
ducing any very great expansion of her existing land 
force, yet some expansion there certainly would be, 
and it would be securely guaranteed in its supply and all 
communications by the power of the British Fleet. 
In the event the uneasiness which such vague fore- 
bodings excited, and the acute irritation to which they 
gave rise, have proved very much better justified than 
the enemy dreamed. The war has not only been " pro- 
tracted " beyond the hmits of a few weeks originally 
intended and provided for ; it has endured beyond all 
conception of Prussia or her foes. The blockade has not 
only become somewhat stricter ; it has had time to grow 
(under the skilful handling of the best because the 
most traditional of our Public departments) almost 
perfect. The powerful neutral interests which ham- 
pered its inception were weakened first by the entry of 
Italy, then, much later, by the grotesque German mis- 
handling of the American temper. Lastly, and far more 
important than anything else, the British service by land 
was multiplied at a pace and with a success utterly beyond 
anything that the enemy or, for that matter, neutral and 
even Allied opinion had thought possible. 
This thing is still so novel that it has not been ap- 
preciated at all. It is known as a mathematical truth 
is known, but it has not yet entered into the imagination, 
memory and sense of the British themselves. To take 
one amazing instance — the growth of heavy artillery. 
It will always be my favourite instance because I have 
heard that arm more discussed than any other. 
The heavy gun is, of all instruments of war, that the 
handling of which, the knowledge, construction and 
" instinct " of which would seem least easily acquired. 
The professional body of officers in this arin prided 
themselves, and rightly, in every European service, upon 
a peculiar position which none could rival, acquired by a 
high and mtense course of study, a long professional 
tradition, and a mass of personal experience. It seemed 
impossible that such an arm could be mtilitplied, not by 
two or three, but by fifty or a hundred. (Such multiples, 
if we reckon in terms of weight, are not exaggerated). 
It seemed still more impossible that even if it could be so 
expanded in the short space of two years, it should stiU 
retain any semblance of efficiency. 
Yet we all know what has been done . This arm has been 
expanded not only on the numerical scale required, but 
the exact accuracy in use without which (in the past trench 
warfare especially) it would have been thrown away, has 
thoroughly made good this summer. 
There is the marvel examined in the hght of one detail. 
Considered in general it is no less amazing. The six 
divisions have grown to what we know to-day ; the few 
thousand yards of front to something close upon a hundred 
miles ; the service as a whole, from the small professional 
army of those short months ago to the vast instrument 
which now is at workin Northern France, in Egypt, in Mace- 
donia, in Mesopotamia, and here in England. And every co- 
ordinated detail of that enormous organism has grown 
to scale in curves of rapidity which are parallel for every 
part of it and have never, through the unequal growth 
of any one out of fifty vital organs, betrayed any really 
dangerous weakness. 
It is perhaps not wonderful that the enemy for all his 
necessity of seeing things as they are — for upon his 
ability to do so depends his very life — should have mis- 
judged an effort so utterly unprecedented. The best 
military historian of modern Germany, and with him 
the best and sanest of the cmrent students of the cam- 
paign, thouf^ they could not deny the numerical 
character of this increase, were convinced of its qualitatiye 
inferiority up to the moment when reality struck them in 
the face upon the Somme. I remember (I think tex- 
tually). one most illuminating phrase, typical of a 
hundred that were written and believed by the enemy 
in this connection. It appeared from the pen of the most 
weighty of his critics just before the attack was launched 
last July, and when the fact that it was about to .be 
deUvered was common knowledge. " One thing is 
certain," he wrote, " if the British are morally capable 
