LAND & WATER 
April 26, 1917 
The German Strategic Reserve 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THE one great interest ot the moment upon the 
\\ cstern field of war is, unfortunately for the purposes 
of description, tlie least picturesijuc point of all : 
It is not the question of advance, nor even of the 
hammering and consequent disintegration of the enemy's 
lint— it is lite degree in which the renewed Allied offensive 
i'-i dragging into the Western whirlpool tiki last German strategic 
reserve. , • , x, 
We all know the situation. Austria was so hit by the 
surrenders in mass last June and July tjjat she remained from 
that moment onwards unable to d9, more than just hold her 
own. She was not able to do that thoroughly upon the East, 
nor upon the Itahan front entirely. l'"or ujwn the East she 
had to Summon a great number of German divisions and even 
to ask for the aid of two Turkish divisions as well. Both the 
Turkish and the German divisions Jmve had to remain helping 
her, for Austria has not been able to,Jind the resources for 
reheving them. 
At the same time, the Bulgarian army is completely occu- 
))ied by the intervention of Roumania and by the forces based 
upon "Salonika. The Turkish resources have also proved 
unequal to the pressure that pould Ije brought against them, 
J nd cannot lend another man from Asia to Europe. 
Therefore, in a degree not hitherto reached, the burden of 
the war upon the enemy's side falls upon the German Empire 
alone. The German Empire represents in man-power almost 
exactly half the great combination which has been formed 
as vassal to Prussia for the attack upon European civilisation. 
But the militarv work now lieing done by the German Empire 
in these latter stages of the Great War, which mark the failure 
of Prussia, is more like three-quarters of the whole, not 
f.xactly in man-power but in weight and effect. 
The chief mark of this last German effort is the creation 
(by a deliberate jjolicy of anticipation and risking the future) 
of a strategic reserve ; and the value of this strategic reserve 
was its capacity of offecting a surprise. It could be thrown 
when it was needed (so the the.^is rit^i) hero or there at the 
"Will of the German Command, that is, of I.eudendorff. 
In other words, the German Higher Command decided 
last December that the summer vi 1917 was their last chance 
of getting a draw, and therefore borrowed future man -power 
to risk everything upon the present. 
They built up a large number of spare divisions and in- 
tended (while refusing action as long as possible, and conse- 
tjuently avoiding loss) to have those spare divisions in hand 
for one last effort launched at a time and place of their own 
choosing. ^ 
Now it is perhaps the most elemi'ntary point in all military 
history that the chit-f condition of victory is the freedom 
to decide the form of an action, and the chief condition of 
defeat the compulsion to accept the form imposed by your 
opponent. .ly i,r 
It would not be true to say that no great action in the 
past has failed to give success to the party which decided its 
lorm, but of the various conditions of victory this power of 
initiative *is the chief. 
The whole point, therefore, o"f 'anticipating income, as it 
were, and creating this strategic reserve in Germany, was the 
ability to use it not where the German Conmiand should be 
compelled to use it by the Allies, but wiierc they themselves 
chose to throw it, to the surprise and discomhture of the Allies. 
It was clear that if a very expensive and continued (iffensive 
could be opened early in the West, by the Allies, this German 
strategic reserv'o would at once be in part rc(4iiired to meet 
the strain. In other words, its value as a force to restore the 
initiative to (iermany and to be flung in at will where and 
when Germany might choose, would be diminished ; and 
diminished in a degree proportionate to that in which the 
Allied ofl'ensive should suck it into the Western whirlpool. 
We know, for instance, what Germany had to do in the 
case of the Somme. She had to throw in, first aiid-last, the 
equivalent of well over 100 of her new reduced divisions, 
counting in infantry 9,000 bayonets at full establishment. 
Anything upon that scale begun early in 191 7 and coi tiiuously 
pressed would utterly, prevent the German strategic reserve 
irom being used ;elst|wherc at all. ' 
Heijce aroscvthe decision to retire upon a new line. When 
that decision was taken we do wot know. What we do now 
knotL by inference from all the surrounding circumstances 
is tiiat Leudendorlf had planned a retirement before that 
pait of the :\llied front on which he conceived the chief pre- 
parations lor a renewed offensive to lie : 1 le further calculated 
that such a retirement would jx^stixme the Allied power of 
developing a new offensixe U>r about two months (such was 
the interval communicated to the (krman papers), and ba.sed 
this calculation partly upon the known or snipposed rate of 
reconstruction with the means available to the Allies, and 
pa'l'v upon a novel act of v.'ar. This novel' act of war con- 
sist!. ^ in the complete destruction of the whole countryside 
over whiBh the retreat was to take place. 
It will be useful here to add to the quotation I put at the 
head of my article last week, in order to show what the view 
of the retirement was in Germany, and to -give e.xamples of 
what the (ierman Higher Ci)mmaiid e.xjx-ctea to be the result 
of the retreat on the St. Ouentin line. 
It will be remembered that the text I put at the head of 
last week's article was the general statement sent round to 
neutral journalists and propagated by wireless towards the 
end' of March, that the German retirement was a master 
stroke ■which had succeeded in destroying the Allies' plan 
for a spring offensive. 
This statement could not have been made at random. It 
may have had a political domestic object in the main, but 
even so it would not have been made if the tiennan com- 
mander could have foreseen what was coming. In other 
words, he has seriously suffered the effect of a surprise. 
Let it be remembered that these pronouncements which I 
am about to quote (and which I owe to the research of 
Monsieur Jean Herbette, the best informed of the l-'rench 
Publicists upon Foreign Affairs, whose collection has been 
put befoFe. me by a correspondent) all belong to the latter 
part of the month of March and the latest of them to the \-ery 
end of tjiat month. Let the reader further remember that 
the tremendous blow struck by Sir Douglas Haig was launched 
in the night before Easter Sunday at the.jijid of what had 
already been a considerable bombardment, and that the 
infantry attack which began this new great battle began just 
at dawn of Easter Monday, April 9th : in ^^her words, there 
is an interval of less than three wteks between the earliest 
of these inspired Press Comments and the beginning of the 
new offensive. 
We have, then, in the collection before me, the principal 
newspaper of Baden instructing its critic to speak thus of 
the retirement : 
" All the projects of our enemy arc now in disarray and 
the initiative has passed into the hands of the German 
Generals." 
The " North German Gazette " expands this statcmriit ;it 
about the same time into the form : 
" The ]-'nglish and l-'roncli liad ordered a vast accumuUilioii 
of material for a war of positions. They liad prepared colossal 
masses of artillery and niunitionment. In a word, they had 
takeii all their dispositions to crush the ,11,'ierman front line 
under an avalanche of iron, and to begin the second battle 
like that of the Somme. Tliis plan has bieen brought to 
nought by our Higher Command." 
The " Vossische Zeitung" on the 19th of March, insists 
further : "^ 
" Hindenburg has often already ordered retreats that were 
no mote' than the prelude to new operations. By the 
nianoLuvTc actually before us he has acquired the .strategic 
initiative on the Western front. We know by experience 
that gnce he has given himself elbow room for free niovcinent 
he. knoAvs how to gel a glorious result fronV^uch freedom." 
The V Lokal Anzeiger." which is ijuitc openly official, dots 
the i's and crosses the t's : 
" The one jxjinton whicli no further doubt is ))ossible )s that 
the fundamental idea of Hindenburg, as in the case of the 
Kussiau campaign, is an offensive." 
The organ of the Westphalian Khineland, which I am told 
has a special military connection, is a little vaguer, but it 
tells us at the same time : 
" We learn that our troops have abandoned their old positions, 
and we are in no error in supposing that this marks the begin- 
ning ol the great decisive battle." 
While the cosmopolitan financiers' paper, the "Cologne 
(.Jdzette " tells its readers as late as the i8th of March, that : 
" In a few weekv. the cours^e oi operations will make the reason 
of the retirenieut clearly understood." 
It is clear from all these pronouncements communicated 
to the German Press and put forward in various forms in its 
