July 19, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
hours this simultaneous bombarament continued, concluding 
by a last hour of very intense and concentrated fire upon the 
foremost positions. From about ^ quarter-past six to about 
a quarter to seven this climax of the artillery was at its height, 
and immediately afterwards the German Marines attacked. 
The defence was able to maintain the fight, apparently for 
about an hour, in spite of the complete destruction of defences 
and machine'guns, which had been effected by the enemy's fire. 
The fact that the advance along the sea coast could be made a 
little more rapidly than elsewhere seems to have permitted 
of an enfilading fire, which completed the enemy's success. 
It seems to have been about half-past eight o'clock before the 
affair was over. 
Very few of the two battalions holding this restricted 
bridgehead returned. But it is difficult to accept the enemy's 
claim to 1,250 valid prisoners out of so small a force. The 
bombardment alone would hardly have left that number, and 
it was followed by more than an hour's heavy hand-to-hand 
and bomb fighting of the survivors, coupled with enfilading 
fire from the German machine guns brought up on the north 
of the line. That more than 60 per cent, of men so engaged 
should have been taken as valid prisoners is not credible, 
especially out of so small a force in action for nearly 24 hours. 
It is probable that the enemy has here again done what he has 
often done in the course of the war, published not the real tale 
of prisoners, but the largest number which he thought could 
be accepted in the first moment of defeat. 
Further south the enemy met with no perm"anent success. 
In the sector immediately to the right of the Northampton' 
he was pushed back from what he had taken ; further south 
again, opposite the ruins of Nieuport and by Lombaertzyde, 
he was held. 
The Present Enemy Strength 
When the military history of 1917 comes to be written, the 
present moment, mid- July, or rather the period including most 
of the month of June and the first half of July, will form a sort 
of watershed between the preparatory actions, and their 
sequel. 
A note on the known present forces of the enemy, though 
it is only a repetition of much that has appeared before in 
these columns, may be of ser\'ice at such a moment. 
The main lines of any such estimate are already familiar 
to the readers of this paper. 
Of the enemy as a whole the German Empire represents 
almost exactly half the numerical strength, and much more 
than half at the present moment of his power of munitionment, 
let alone the moral factors of organisation and command. 
Further, the quality of the German troops is still superior, 
taken all round, to the quality of the other half of the Alliance 
to which we are opposed. There are still Austrian, Hun- 
garian, Turkish and Bulgarian troops in the field as good as the 
best that the German Empire can show. An ample proof of 
this truth has been given in Macedonia, upon the Carso, and in 
Asia. But the point is that the German Empire has not yet 
developed patches as weak as many that the Dual Monarchy 
now exhibits, on account of excessive mixture of races under 
its command. The same is true of the Turkish Empire with 
its mixture of races and imperfect recruitment. 
Now, as always, therefore, a study of the German forces 
alone is our best guide. For though the Germans could 
have done nothing without their allies, they remain the 
nucleus of those allies. We know more about them, and we 
can argue from them " a fortiori " ; for any numerical weak- 
ness in them applies with greater force to all the other members 
of the Prussian following, with the exception of Bulgaria. 
The total number of people included in the German military 
organisation, " drawing rations " as the French express it, 
was, at the beginning of June, well over five million— probably 
nearly five million and a half. 
This may be called in one sense of the term the German 
" Army," and certainly anyone talking of the German Army 
in the technical sense, would count all that enormous number 
as belonging to it. But we should make a very great mistake 
if we here used the translated term " army," the word in its 
primitive sense, the sense of the novel and the newspaper— 
that is, a body of armed men in conflict. A modeta army is 
something very different, especially a modern army under 
field conditions. 
The active force immediately in contact with the enemy, 
the men who in rotation occupy the trenches defensively or 
are launched offensively to the assault, are a comparatively 
small proportion of the whole. These are the infantry with a 
small admixture of dismounted cavalry. , 
Even the whole fighting army properly so-called, that is, 
the organised divisions, is a much smaller proportion ot the 
whole than was the case in former times. _ . 
Thus in the instance of the German army at the beginning 
of last June, we have a number of organised divisions which 
at their present establishment counting all parts of a division 
—not only infantry, but cavalry, artillery, medical and other 
auxihary services and staff, amount to something perhaps 
iust over, but at the most, very Uttle over, tlu-ee million men. 
It is a point on which there is room for error from tliQse causes : 
(i) The Germans formed early in the year more divisions than 
they could keep up and had to break up some of tliese divisions 
—so that the number of divisions true of, say, March ist, would 
not be true of April ist ; (2) Information is not sunultaneous. 
A division is identified, say, in Roumama on Marcli ist 
It disappears on the 15th. It may have been broken up 
or it may be resting, or it may be on its way to the \\ est. 
An estimate made in April would be m doubt about it Mean- 
while another division is identified in Champagne on March 
20th. A report drawn up on April 1st would show both 
these divisions in being at that date ; yet one might already 
have ceased to be. [Note, for instance, the 119th division; 
with Bothmer in January against the Russians, then sent 
either inland or to the Western front, now certainly replaced 
by some other division with Bothmer as yet unidentified.) 
(3) The reduction in the establishment of a German division 
is not quite homogeneous throughout the whole army. If 
we put the number of divisions at more than 220 and less 
than 230, and the average strength of a division at more than 
12,000 or less than 14,000 men* we have a minimum of two 
million and three-quarters and a maximum of three millions 
and a quarter. 
The arm which suffers the bulk of the casualties and the 
wastage of which is critical, the infantry — " the bayonets "— 
are a still smaller fraction. They are little if any more than 
half this force. When everything was at its full original 
establishmeht, the ihfantry, " the bayonets," were more tlian 
half, they were 60 per cent. But all that has changed. The 
proportion of artillery has increased, especially of heavy 
artillery, so has the proportion of other and lesser technical 
arms, the auxiliaries necessary to a division have increased 
and the infantry battalions have been cut down to three- 
quarters of their old strength. At present, one may say that 
w ithin a small margin of error, the non-technical infantry alone 
actively used are about 50 per cent, of the organised divisions. 
The number of battalions organised and within the fighting 
zone (counting, of course, those held in reserve, but within the 
fighting zone) is roughly 2,000. And the average of a battalion 
was, as we have said, probably, at the beginning of June, 
about 750 men. The German Army, therefore, counted at 
that moment something like a million and a half bayonets, of 
whom rather more than the million were on the Western 
front and rather less than the odd half-million were on the 
East, from Macedonia to the Baltic. 
The German troops on the East were slightly interspersed 
among the Bulgarian troops ; more largely among the Austro- 
Hungarian troops from the Danube to the Pnpet, and formed 
the main part of the extremely thin line which held the great 
distance from Pripet to the Baltic, where the Germans rightly 
expected little activity and had further put their worst ele- 
ments so far as quality was concerned. Those on the West 
were their best divisions and far the most heavily protected 
with artillery. „ . , , , 
It is this million and a half that are suffenng the heavy 
casualties of the present fighting season, and especiaUy the 
larger portion which is upon the West. This force of bayonets 
has behind it for filling of gaps as it wastes much the greater 
portion of the reserve of German man-power. In other 
words, much the greater portion of this reserve is drafted for 
^'^We'lnow of what that reserve consists. There were, 
roughly speaking, at the beginning of June, more than 450,000 
men but less than 500,000 men in depot. To supplement 
these there was nothing but class 1919, the training of which 
has now begun and which will be put into the field probably 
in the autumn (though portions of it may have to be used 
beforehand), 350,000 lads already in trainmg with another 
150,000 to come in later. There is nothmg left to comb 
out" from among the working population behind the armies 
On the contrary, a certain number have had to be sent back 
thi^ spring to the workshops and the mines^ though only a very 
small^proportion.^^^ in the present year has differed of course, 
enormously with the nature of the fighting. Until quite 
• TikPa tvDical case. 5 Divisions identifted ill Galicia, of these 4 
of 3 Reg m^ents only, hke the great buUc of German divisions 
3 "-eg ^^_^^^y jjyj ^i^g jtij of 4 regiments. 
