June 14, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
LAND & WATER 
OLD SERJEANTS' INN. LONDON, W.C, 
Telephone HOLBORN 2828. 
THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 1917 
CONTENTS 
PAGE 
Only Securities. By Louis Raemaekers i 
The Plain Issue. (Leader) ' 3 
Wytschaete Ridge. By Hilaire Belloc 4 
Germany's Lost Opportunity; By Arthur Pollen 7 
Past and Future. By Jason 9 
The Stockholm Conference. By H. M. Hyndman i« 
An Affair of Machinery. By The Author of " A Grand 
Fleet Chaplain's Notebook " 12 
Success of Mr. Balfour's Mission. By an Onlooker in ' 
America ' j-] 
Simple Strategy. By Stephen McKenna 14 
Memory. By J. C. Squire if) 
Books to Read. By Lucian Oldershaw i<S 
On the Western Front. (Photographs) 19 
Domestic Economy 20 
Kit and Equipment 23 
THH PLAIN LSSUE 
A SERIES of articles which have appeared in this 
paper during the last few weeks, and the sense of 
many others which have distinguished the British 
-Press since the war entered its final phase, can be 
conveniently and profitably summarised at this moment. 
Roughly speaking there are now throughout, civilisation 
two groups of opinion ; one which is that of a wearied or 
bewildered minority, aided by a tiny fraction of visionaries ; 
the other which is that of the vast majority and which has no^ 
changed with the changing fortunes and the increasing 
length, and therefore strain, of the war. The first group 
(which is to tlie second as perhaps i is to 100, but which in the 
nature of things includes too many of the Intellectuals), 
thinks in terms of negotiation. It regards the words 
" defeat " and " victory " as rhetorical terms with little 
precise meaning attached to them. It envisages certain 
schemes of settlement : " Can we obtain this ? Shall we 
by prolonging the conflict lose that ? Was June or was 
October the time when we could have obtained most from 
the Germans ? " and so forth. The other group, which is 
that of the whole mass of the populace and of the over- 
whelming majority of educated men, thinks upon the contrary 
in terms of victory or defeat, distinguishes broadly between 
negotiations which proceed between two foes, neither of 
whom has definitely conquered the other, and the capitulation 
of a broken foe. Negotiations of the first sort it regards as 
the very proof of failure. Capitulation is the only goal at 
which it aims. 
Which of these two schools is right does not perhaps depend 
upon their relative numerical strength, though in these 
universal issues where you may say that all mankind is 
engaged, the overwhelming vote of mankind is not to be 
neglected even as an index to truth. But though we eliminate 
such a consideration and ask for a better proof of judgment 
than mere majority, we can find it in history. 
For history clearly distinguishes,' if it is read in the largest 
manner, between those wars which we cafl dynastic or partial 
or local, and which have for their object some detailed re- 
settlement of complex and disputed things, and those other 
wars in which the whole soul of each combatant is at stake. 
The ambition of Louis XIV., for instance, provoked against 
him a powerful coalition which ultimately curbed his power 
and, upon negotiation, left him but in part possessed of all 
that he had desired. The Crimean War was a war in which 
ri certain balance between opposing forces was desired 
and for a time attained by the victors. But there are 
(though at rare intervals) in the history of Europe, enormous 
quarrels between incompatible spirits and destinies, and in 
these quarrels one or the other entirely siu:cumbs. It must 
be so. because the conflicting things are not ambitions 
dynastic or even merely national, but universal spirits. In 
these wars the protagonists are really fighting for something 
much greater than themselves : for the whole future of man- 
kind. A typical example is the early Greek defence against 
the Persian Monarchy. Had the Persian invasion succeeded 
nothing of our civilisation would be what it is to-day. The 
Grecian effort was a mere defensive though a successful one, 
but it contained in itself the germ of what followed, the 
Hellenisation of the Near East and all the incalculable conse- 
quence to Europe and to the world. The Punic wars are 
another instance : others, the tremendous and obscure 
but happily victorious struggle of the Dark Ages against the 
Northern Paganism, and the bitter war between Islam at 
its highest and Europe, of which the Mediterranean was the 
principal theatre, but of which the critical moment came quite 
early when the invading Mohammedan was overthrown as far 
north as Poitiers. 
Now it is the whole gist of all that sane men write and 
speak to-day, it is the very core of their argument, that this 
great war is of the latter kind. It is a hopeless misjudgment 
to think the business could be settled were some ambition 
of a German dynasty on the one hand, or some French 
. historical memory, some British claim to this or that law 
of the seas satisfied upon the other. The forces at work 
in this war are indefinitely larger than such motives, which 
are but the symptoms of its action. For we had in the 
launching of this war by the German people a challenge, 
and as they thought, a victorious challenge, thrown down 
to the whole spiritual tradition of Europe. This is not a 
matter for discussion, as of theories ; it is a plain matter of 
historical fact. Their books, their speeches, their newspaper 
articles, their whole expression, proposed a doctrine of racial 
superiority and for that matter — to put it plainly — of making 
a perversion conquer. 
The German-speaking folk as a whole — all those within 
the new German Empire and in a lesser degree those outside 
that Empire — had been indoctrinated for now more than a 
"generation with two principles which they had come to regard 
at least as demonstrably true. The first was that the morals 
and traditions of the general civilisation of Europe, its music, 
its religion, and the rest, had grown old and were breaking 
down, were no longer-worthy of respect and might actually 
be reversed to a new art and even a new morality. How 
revolting to us that morality was, and if it were possible how 
still more revolting that art, we need not pause to consider, 
but the whole work of modern Germany is there to prove 
that this constant doctrine of the traditions of Europe being 
outworn had everywhere permeated. And the second prin- 
ciple held even more devoutly than the first and more 
generally that the conquering agents of the great change were 
to be the German-speaking tribes. 
This rhood, which its enemies have called insane (but that 
is rather begging the question) was manifest not only on the 
large* lines of general expression, but in a million details of 
daily living. It has shown itself in the rmmentionable — and 
also innumerable — acts of defilement of altars and tombs ; 
in the equally inumerable acts of cruelty, of which only the 
most famous reach our ears, and perhaps most of all in the 
rooted conviction that nothing can forbid the triumph of 
those who act thus. 
Now a spirit of this sort is either broken or it survives. If 
it is broken, that is, if its will power is broken, and it is com- 
pelled by enfo'rce'd impotence to acknowledge defeat, that 
which opposed it will continue to live. If it is not broken, if 
it treats for peace as an equal, and can pretend at the end of 
the struggle to proud negotiation, then the thing which it 
challenged is itself doomed. It is with a contrast of this sort 
as with a contrast between a living organism and a sub- 
stance poisonous to that organism. You have no choice 
between eradicating the poison or the death of the organism. 
So it is with Prussian Germany and Europe. 
To conclude with a test point to which we shall return : 
Shall England and France continue until they have the 
power of punishing the individual German men guilty of 
these novel crimes in this war ? If we do not proceed to that 
point then we acknowledge the defeat of civilisation, and we 
shall henceforward uninterruptedly decline. 
