LAND & WATER 
June 5, 1917 
iqi8 had been caUed' up. The medical examination of 
the class took place last April, and the last proclamations 
appeared, if I am not mistaken, early in May : that is, the 
pubUc summons. If the German method were that of 
certain other conscript rations, notably the French, we might 
conclude without hesitation that during May the greater 
part of 1919 had actually been incorporated and was to be 
found in the depots. But' there is, unfortunately, this element 
of difficulty in the calcul.ttion. The Germans call up their 
classes in detail and bv aegions. We know that certain 
regions, that of the 15th Corps, for instance, had all their 
Class i()i() called up two months ago. But we are not yet 
fully informed with regard to the greater part of the Empire 
in this respect. Wliat we do knc)W is that 1919 has passed 
its medical examination and ii not actually for the greater part 
already in the depots will be there very shortly indeed. We 
may similarly presume that the first elements of 1919 will 
appear upon the field in the eaiiy part of next Autumn,perhaps 
even before October. Until that date the enemy is dependent 
upon his hospital returns. It is known that he is combing 
out no more men from civihan aujciliary employment ; upon 
the contrary, he has actually now to send some back. It is 
not so very "long ago that he sent back 20,000 miners from the 
field to the pit and there are indications that he has not a 
sufficient labour power behind him.in spite of the enslavement 
of occupied districts. 
From this digression, which I hope sufficiently explains 
the degree of exhaustion the enemy is now suffering, 
\vc can return to the chief effect of this phenomenon, the 
" storming troo])s." ■ 
Tliese " storming troops " consist of battalions not only 
specially trained, but specially selected ; the men are picked 
for their physique, or their character, or their intelligence, 
from all manner of units and are then subjected to special 
training. Their functions are highly differentiated. They are 
themselves imb\ied with the idea of superiority to the rest of 
the army and that remainder has to treat them as superiors. 
They are exempt from duty in the trenches and kept before 
action at some distance behind the lines. They are saved as 
far as possible all unnecessary fatigue and when they are to 
be used they are distributed in comparatively small groups 
among the other troops to form " spear heads " as it were 
for the attacks contemplated. 
The disadvantages of such a system "of last resort" 
are very well known and have been discussed in pretty 
well every text book dealing with such affairs, nor 
would the energy have been driven to it but for that 
degree of deterioration, itself the consequence of excessive 
casualities of which we have spoken. The mass of an 
army out of which its best elements are thus taken loses in 
quality quite out of proportion to the numbers with- 
drawn. The parallel to this is within the experience of every- 
one. If you take the best bowler and the best batsman from 
a cricket eleven you weaken your team by a great deal 
more than two-elevenths. If you withdrew from a political 
society the five per cent, or so of its educated men you would 
weaken its competitive power against foreign societies by 
much more than five per cent. And though the picked men 
chosen for the stormmg troops have not the same sort of 
superiority over their fellows, yet this superiority is 
sufficiently marked for their absence to involve a further 
serious depreciation in the quality of the mass from which 
they are withdrawn. 
This drawback, however, is not the greatest of the reasons 
that have always made commanders hesitate till the 
last , moment before adopting such formations under 
the pressure of necessity. A far graver considera- 
tion is the effect upon the mass of the checks inflicted 
upon chosen bodies of the sort. It is a paradox, but it is true, 
that the very conditions which compel the formation of such 
selected units are those which render the use of them dangerous. 
This is even true in the much broader and more general 
case of the Corps d' Elite and it is worth noting that the latter 
usually appear in mihtar^^ history, hke Napoleon's Guard, in 
moments of success, and fail to retrieve a lost cause when the 
downward process is far advanced. 
In the particular case of these " stprming troops " this 
truth is much more evident. They come into use not 
in the moment of success but after the moment when 
the sentiment of defeat' is already heavy upon the army 
as a whole. They are used to maintain with difficulty by 
continual counter^action positions to which in defeat a force 
has been driven back and they are, as it were, doomed 
to negessary and repeated checks which serve as examples 
or warnings to all their fellows. The last few weeks' fight 
on the Chemin-de-Dames has been exceedingly instructive 
in this point. For one small local success scored by the rush 
of the new formations, or rather their mixture with the 
attacking troops, you have a dozen cases in which they are 
broken. 
There is'a last consideration of which the enemy's command 
is well aware and which will begin to tell before very long. 
The material necessary for such formations is limited. Its 
quality necessarily deteriorates very rapidly and its rate of 
loss is ver^. high. Even when you have consented to weaken 
the averagfe of your forces by this system of selection you are 
like a man borrowing money with the dehberate purpose of 
spending it wastefully. What the proportion in casualties 
is between the storming troops and the rest I do not know. 
It is certainly not double. Perhaps it is not more than a third 
in excess of the average ; perhaps even lower than that. 
But at any rate, it is always superior to the average rate 
of casualties and must be so from the veiy expensive 
, nature of the work for which these special units arc 
designed. 
It cannot be denied that there is a certain moral effect 
produced by selection of this sort as there is in the larger 
case of the corps d'iehte. In other words, you get naore 
out of the selected units than their original superiority before 
they were trained together might seem to warrant ; they have 
an espirit de corps and a corresponding tenacity in attack 
due to their peculiar position among the forces. But this 
moral advantage does not long outweigh the drawbacks we 
have mentioned, and that is why an experiment of this kind 
is never tried until the latter phases of a losing fight, and only 
then as a desperate experiment. 
The Transformation of War_II 
I said last week that the present great campaign had 
gradually produced a certain transformation in the methods 
of war. The first type of this transformation was that of 
scale, both in time and in space. 
The second tyj^e of transformation proceeds from the 
departure the enemy has made from the conventions hitherto 
imposed by European morals upon the conduct of war. 
This development of the war has a most important political 
side, of course, which will appear very largely in the settlement 
follo\ving Jpon the enemy's defeat ; and this political side, the 
restriction of war in the future as far as possible to normal 
boundaries and to the methods recognised by the European 
conscience, will be of much more consequence than the 
technical military results we are about to study. Indeed, 
upon the success or failure of such restriction largely depends 
the future of our civihsation and in particular of this country. . 
But, neglecting for the moment this larger issue, let us confine 
ourselves to the military results pure and sim"ple. 
I have no space this week to do more than catalogue the 
new methods brought in by the Germans. I will to-day 
attempt such definitions and leave a fuller examination 
of them to later articles in this series. 
The novelties of which I speak are of two separate kinds. 
In one category come the various invasions of non-belligerent 
rights ; in another come the introduction of new and hitherto 
prohibited methods of warfare against beUigerent forces by 
sea and land. The first of these, is by far the more 
important, paradoxically enough. i& aU iuilitai*' ejfcct. 
The novel methods of attack against armed men, both 
those which have been accepted and those which we still regard 
as abominable innovations, have not anywhere produced the 
results which were expected of them. It is the political 
side of the innovations and outraging of non -belligerents 
which have most profoundly modified war. 
Consider the comparatively slight result of mere novelty 
m atrocity of attack. The novelty that came nearest to 
success was the introduction of poisonous gas by the Germans 
in April 1915. It came, if we are to believe the accounts of 
many eye-witnesses, very near to success. 
(i) It had all the effect of surprise. The power of doing 
such things was common to all civihsed nations, but it was 
not I believed that any civihsed nation would use that 
power. 
(2) The discharge of gas was delivered "at the point of junc- 
tion between the two Allied armies. 
(3) The troops attacked consisted in great part upon the 
French side of native troops upon whom this unusual engine 
of warfare had, of course, a special effect of terror. 
(4) The attack took place not only at a point of junction 
but at a point where the line was not strongly defended. 
As a matter of fact, a complete rupture was produced in the 
lines and, so far as we can judge, if the enemy had taken full 
advantage of his success he might, even at so late a date, have 
modified the course of the war by that single act. A very 
wide gap opened between the Canadians on the extreme left 
of the English hue and the nii.xcd troops of the French riyht. 
