March 29, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
of a prolonged offensive it will be the end of the British 
Army." In that phrase you have summed up the whole 
. of the enemy's attitude towards the change. 
There have been many elements of surprise, as I was 
writing here a few weeks ago, in this war from which 
strategical surprise is said to have disappeared. No 
element of surprise has surpassed in value or effect the 
surprise the enemy has suffered in respect of what new 
thing in the way of arms this country could effect. 
Elements of Surprise 
There remained, and still remains, in connection with 
the Alliance between the two ancient nations of the West, 
one avenue of hope for the enemy which had calculated 
upon the destruction of the one and the fear and 
neutrality of the other. It is the expectation, or the 
trust, that the difficulties inherent in an alliance would 
certainly appear and increase, at any rate under the 
strain of a protracted war. 
The matter has been so overlain with the international 
conventions necessary to the pubHc conduct of such a 
campaign ; it has so much suffered, therefore, from 
unreality (and the consequent reaction of honest minds 
against unreality) that we are more than justified, at this 
stage, in soberly counting what the elements of danger 
were. The list is formidable, especially for so grievous 
a trial and one so prolonged. It is little wonder that 
the enemy over-valued that list ; or rather it is of little 
wonder, until one has considered certain simpler but far 
greater considerations upon the other side. 
The two nations thus conjoined had been for centuries 
in an almost constant antagonism. Their very rare 
alliances had been ephemeral and designed for no more 
than small, particular purposes, soon accomplished. 
The contrast in their temperaments was so sharp that 
the Germans themselves had given to it a grotesque 
historical explanation, and in their pedantic explanation 
of the ill-ease which French energy caused them inter- 
preted the English as brethren of their own. Our own 
Universities supported with their weight this curious 
illusion. 
There had arisen a break in religion which in the past 
had led to violent animosities and which had produced, 
with other causes, the profound modern divergence 
between the two peoples. 
There had also arisen a complete separation in language, 
growing the more acut? as the last four hundired years 
proceeded. 
The effect of each upon the world had usually been in 
rivalry to the other, and that with methods that had so 
little in common as to arrive at the wholly different 
results we see before us to-day in Colonial experiment 
and domestic organisation. 
All this opposition had entered into the popular tradi- 
tions of each and had in the past become a sort of common- 
place taken for granted upon either side ; while the last 
hundred years or more (the period since the Revolution 
— the memory of which is so vivid in either people and 
yet interpreted so differently by each) seemed only to 
have accentuated the direct negation which the political 
experience and judgment of the one gave to those of the 
other. 
When we consider that any alliance between sovereign 
nations alwaj^ contains of itself serious elements of 
friction and therefore of danger ; when we add to this 
the truths that such perils are peculiarly present when 
you are dealing with equals, that they are accentuated 
in proportion to the national pride and sensibility of such 
equals, that they are present almost in proportion to the 
power which each member of the alliance can wield, and 
that, above all, time and strain are the two master 
solvents of alliances throughout history — when all this 
is put together and appreciated, we can judge upon 
what the enemy founded his hopes in the poUtical sphere. 
His own vast system of Allies and dependents was 
secure because Prussia alone among them had military 
competence and because a geographical unity bound them 
together. But here in the West his two formidable 
executioners suffered from all the differences of which I 
speak, and to crown them was the geographical dis- 
parity between the continent and an island. 
The confidence the enemy had placed in this one 
avenue of escape from his fate, if it had something reason- 
able about it had also in its exaggerations and insistence 
something pathetic and almost comic. 
I have in my possession, for instance, a document, 
which was scattered by German aviators over French 
territory as late as last Jtme, assuring the French that the 
abominable crime of bombarding civiUans from the sky 
(which no decent nation would be guilty of) had only 
sullied the reputation of their aviators through the 
wicked suggestion of the English. The French were 
told that the war was essentially an English war. It 
was a folly repeated with the special object of offending 
French while tinghng British pride, and the curiously 
puerile side of the German character has appeared in the 
brilliant suggestion that the English army had only 
landed in France with the object of annexing Boulogne. 
If we ask ourselves why this German confidence in an 
ultimate mistrust between the Western Allies seems to 
us thus grotesque and suffers from such astonishing 
misjudgments, we shall find the answer in considering, 
by way of conclusion, the profound forces which are 
acting for union much more strongly than any of those 
more obvious but more superficial elements of difference 
which we have just considered. 
Moral Anarchy 
To begin with the basest, the most material, and 
therefore the most generally admitted, there is between 
England and France to-day a community of interests 
such as that which binds any two sane men against a 
third who has run mad. Two men, though they had 
only met by chance, though they had nothing whatever 
in common save sanity, though they differed, and even 
knew they had differed, in every vital matter which 
separates souls, would at once combine to restrain in a 
third that moral anarchy which in private relations we 
caU madness. It is a matter of life and death to do so. 
He who proclaims his indifference to the right of others, 
even to the right to live, if his nature provokes and 
maintains an indissoluble combination against himself, 
he is caught and bound ; and if there is any possibility 
of his breaking his bonds he is put to death. It must 
be so, for if it were not so his life would involve the death 
of the rest. 
It is not true that the ordinary political considerations 
of separate national interest continue alone to bind the 
Western Allies, whatever may have been true in the 
period before the war. It is no longer true, and has not 
been true since the first atrocities in Belgium, that the 
supreme interest of Great Britain in maintaining herself 
against a Power that menaced her vital necessity of the 
sea, and the supreme interest of France in preserving her 
soil from invasion, form together the main link. What 
forms the main Unk to-day is the certitude, proved and 
insisted upon by Prussia, that if power is left to her she 
will — in her time and at her time — respect the life of 
neither France nor Britain. That she will use all means 
to destroy the corporate life of the one as of the other. 
But more fundamental by far than this external 
necessity is something inner and spiritual of which it is 
no more than the expression. There is in common to all 
our Western civihsation a way of regarding both peace 
and war from which has sprung a civil and a military 
tradition, with which the existence of the Prussian 
doctrine is incompatible. War must be, for the West, 
accompanied at its worst by something (in memory at 
least) of glory, and by much in its actual practice of 
chivalry and of honour. If it takes on the form of 
national murder it is spiritually intolerable ; and the 
soul which suffers from an appetite for such murder 
must be wholly converted or it must be destroyed. 
If we go deeper still I think we shall discover that this 
spiritual community which arms the older civilisations 
against Prussia is rooted in what is the chief mark of a 
mature culture, I mean, intelligence. The spiritual 
perversion which the older civilisations cannot tolerate 
save at the expense of their own death essentially con- 
notes an inability to reason. It sees the first step ; 
it cannot see the second or the third. It sees that 
terror destroys opposition for the moment. It does not 
see that terror makes the justice which shall deal with 
it implacable. It sees that mere theft enriches ; it does 
not see that the whole process of production is at war 
against theft. It sees that a dead man can no longer 
use an arm. It does not see what his death may lend 
to the arms of the living. H. Belloc 
