LAND & WATER 
July 19, 1917 
CJe War 
Strategic Value of Stryj 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THROUGHOUT this campaign there have appeared 
over and over again certain strategical points, the 
occupation of which would have had perhaps decisive, 
and certainly locally decisive, effects upon the Great 
War. The threat to these points has been immediately seized 
on by competent students of the campaign ; the consequences 
that would follow upon their occupation by either side have 
been pointed out. 
When there has been a failure to reach those points by 
either party, when " the threat " has not matured, there has 
been a reaction in opinion toward what is called " pessimism " 
whether in Berlin and Vienna on the one side, or Paris and 
London on the other ; because the reader of such comments 
puts the indicative for the conditional into what he reads and 
thinks that he has been told a thing will happen because it 
may happen, and if it did happen would be of advantage to 
his side in the conflict. 
This difficulty attaching to any intelligent criticism of the 
camapign has not been felt upon the Allied side alone. It has 
been felt just as severely upon the enemy's side. 
Let us consider a few examples. In the first days of the 
war, the German army, advancing by what is known as the 
gap of Charmes in Lorraine after his victory south of Metz, 
was clearly seen by those who were studying the war among 
our opponents to be upon the eve of a decisive success. It 
reached and passed Luji6ville, and had it reached the Moselle 
and crossed that river, all the defensive positions to the north 
would have been turned, and the battle of the Grand Couronne 
would never have been fought and won. The Germans did 
not reach and cross the Moselle. They were taken in flank 
by General de Castelnau on August 25th, compelled to retreat, 
and suffered the immensely expensive defeat of the Grand 
Couronne immediately afterwards. Upon these foundations 
was built the victory of the Marne. 
Those among our opponents who were following the cam- 
paign as intelligently as matters of this vast importance should 
be followed, must have appreciated both the chances of a 
strategical German success and its failure. The fact that it 
failed in no way contradicts the strategical importance of the 
thing attempted, and he would indeed be a poor student of 
war who refused to understand a plan because the plan in 
operation failed. 
Strategic Hypothesis 
There are, I say, dozens of such examples scattered up and 
down the history of the last three years. The district lying 
immediately behind the river Yser later in the same year 
1914 had the same strategical importance. If the enemy 
h id won the race to the sea and occupied this territory, pressing 
forward to the ports of the Channel upon the flanks of the 
Allies, the effect of the Marne would have been reversed. 
Competent criticism in Germany appreciated this and said 
it. If that territory had later been reached by the breaking 
of the Allied line in front of Ypres, such an advance 
would have been of first class strategical importance. Both 
these German attempts failed, but no intelligent German 
student of the war would have excused himself for mis- 
understanding the importance of the movement simply 
because the movem'ent did not reach its conclusion. 
Early in the next year we had the Russian threat to the 
Moravian Gate and to Cracow imposed by the Russians against 
the enemv, and at the same time the equily important strategi- 
cal objective of the Hungarian Passes, and especially the Dukla. 
The passes were never occupied down to their debouching 
point upon the plain ; the Moravian Gate was never reached ; 
Cracow never fell. But those places retain their strategical 
meaning just as much as though their strategic use had been 
fully exploited. Bapaume at one moment of the battle of the 
Somme, Douai after Vimy, all the district lying behind the 
west bank of the Meuse at Verdun, are other instances in point. 
Such has been the course of the war that both parties can 
now cite an alno.t equal list of such things. My object in 
recalling them is to guard against a false impression in dis- 
cussing, as I propose to do this week, the strategical import- 
ance of Stryj and the reasons which make this point at once 
the immediate objective of our Russian Allies and its retention 
the necessary task of our opponents. To say so much is not 
to say that Stfyj will be reached by our Allies or that Stryj 
will be successfully defended by our foes. It is merely to 
explain what underUes the strategical situation in Galicia. 
^o that it may be presented to the reader as an intelligible 
thing instead of a chaos, which a confused reading of the 
communiques presents. 
When of two forces stretched in a line one before the other, 
the superior is trying to break the defensive line of the 
inferior, one capital element in the power of the defence is, as 
we all know, lateral communications. Your main communica- 
tions which should noimally come down perpendicular to your 
line from your bases, feed you and permit the evacuation of 
your wounded; etc. They are your very life. Lateral com- 
munication is communication across these, parallel to your line 
and just behind it. It is lateral communications that you use 
for moving men from one part of the line to the other as they 
may be needed, and as the pressure is felt first upon one point 
and then upon another. If your lateral communication jams 
or is found wanting, if you cannot concentrate your men and 
material at threatened points as rapidly as your superior 
opponent can concentrate his to bring pressure upon those 
points, that opponent will break you somewhere by bringing 
to bear against you forces so much stronger than your own at 
the particular point threatened that your line fails to hold. ; 
Lateral communications thus serving the front behind and 
parallel to the line to be defended are in the present condition 
of war of two kinds : Roads along which petrol trafiic can be 
used, and railways. The value of roads relative to railways 
has enormously increased since the advent of petrol traffic, 
that is, of the internal combustion engine. But a railway 
still remains essential, and we must study the two combined 
in order to understand the defensive power of any sector. 
Now, if the reader will look at Map I, he will see what 
the conditions of lateral communications are for the Russian 
and the Austro-German respectively. The Russian lateral 
communications are bad. There is no main road and there 
is no railway system by which our Ally can rapidly move 
considerable bodies of men- from north to south and south to 
north between, say, the region of Brody and the region of 
Stanislau. On the other hand, upon all that line the 
superiority of numbers and possibly, for the moment, of 
material (though not of observation) is with our Alhes. It 
would appear also that they have the superiority of moral, 
which is the most important thing of all. The Russians, 
therefore, without being compelled to move considerable 
bodies of men or to make considerable new concentrations 
of material, can exercise pressure now here now there upon the 
line at will — I am speaking, of course, of the purely military 
problem without considering the political one which lies 
behind it. I am presupposing an independent military com- 
mand able to take the fullest advantage of its oppbrtunities. 
The enemy, on the other hand, has to move considerable 
bodies back and forth to meet each new pressure or threat of 
pressure upon the various points of his front. He is com- 
pelled to such movement for two reasons : First, his numerical 
inferiority, which he can only supplement by mobility ; 
secondly, and more gravely, by the lack of homogeneity 
among his forces. The Slav units have not the same value 
to him in this war between Germans and Slavs as have the 
German speaking and Magyar units. While.it is also to be pre- 
sumed that the German divisions proper, that is, the divisions 
drawn from the German Empire and under its command, are 
more reliable than the divisions of the more exhausted Austro- 
Hungarian forces. The enemy is therefore compelled to move 
German and Magyar troops to the threatened points, as well as 
compelled to move merely for purposes of concentration. 
The mass of the German troops when the attack began 
were under Bothmer south of Brzezany. The composition 
of the forces north of the Dniester was : on the extreme left 
or north, in front of Koniuchy three Austrian divisions,the 
32rd, 38th Honved, and 54th ; the centre, near Brzezany, 
two Turkish divisions, the igth and 20th, forming the XVth 
corps ; then southward on to the Dniester five Gerrnan 
divisions, 53rd, 36th, 75th and 48th reserve, and one division 
unidentified ; Halicz bridgehead was held by two divisions, 
of which I do not know the numbers, and there were four 
more German divisions available within 48 hours for the 
region south of the Dniester — eleven in all. 
But the troops actually continuing the line south of the 
Dniester in front of Jezupol and up the Black Bystryza were 
not of the same quality. 
Brussiloff first pinned the bulk of the German and Turkish 
forces in the centre by the big attack in the Brzezany region on 
T ul v I St and 2nd. He further deceived Bothmer into believing 
