July 26, 1917 
LAND &' WATER 
LAND & WATER 
OLD SERJEANTS' INN, LONDON, W.C. 
Telephone HOLBORN 2828. / 
THURSDAY, JULY 26, 1917 
CONTENTS 
PAGE 
The Eyes of the Army. By Louis Raemaekers i 
Truth about Democracy. (Leader) 3 
The Action near Craonne. By Hilaire Belloc 4 
Food Situation in Holland. By John C. van der Veer 8 
A Dreadnought of the Air. By E. Percy Noel q 
On Parole in Gclderland. By a Prisoner of War 1 1 
The Waste of Youth. By Jason. 13 
Mr. Conrad's Masterpiece. By J. C. Squire 15 
Rivers of Scotland. By W. T. Palmer 16 
The New Boy. By J. D. Symon 17 
Books to Read. By L. Oldershaw 18 
Sedes. (Illustrated.) By H. Russell Wakefield 19 
Domestic Economy 22 
Kit and Equipment 25 
TRUTH ABOUT DEMOCRACY 
WE shall have to be very careful in this country 
and throughout the Great Alliance, especially 
in the near future, of phrases which have become 
almost universal in the mouths of the poUticians 
and which may well, if we abuse them, weaken our military 
efiort. They turn on the use of the word ' ' democracy." Wc 
are told that the Allied nations are fighting for " democracy " ; 
that " the struggle is between democracy and autocracy," 
and even — most dangerous phrase of all — that our quarrel is 
not with " a democratic Germany," but only with Germany 
as at present organised under an autocracy. 
There is a sense in which the first of these two phrases is 
true ; but there is no sense in which the last phrase is true— 
and it is exceedingly important that we should distinguish 
between the spirit which inspires the one set of words and the 
spirit which inspires the other. It is true that the Alliance 
represents above everything the right of each conscious 
political community to its own life and the right of such com- 
munities to govern themselves. It is true that it is fighting, 
and has been fighting from the first moment when Prussia 
suddenly declared war upon Europe three years ago, for this 
principle ; and it is especially true that the enemy, the two 
Central Powers, the reigning houses of Hohenzollern and 
Hapsburg- Lorraine each (though' for different reasons) 
stand for the opposite principle. They claim that the con- 
sciousness of races and communities is weak, and that admini- 
stration and material welfare will outweigh with men the 
mere ideal of local patriotism. It is further true that the 
gross violation of national freedom and of the right of a nation 
to its continued and independent existence have proceeded 
from the Central Powers and particularly from Prussia. 
Prussia for 200 years past has never varied from her declara- 
tion that she cared nothing for national rights and was only 
concerned with the advancement of her own power, especially 
as expressed in her dynasty. 
All this is true. But when people go further and try to 
make it out that some particular scheme or experiment in 
human government, such as a Parliament to which the 
Ministry is nominally responsible, universal suffrage, etc., 
etc., is the test between the two belligerents, they ire talking 
nonsense. The war is much more real than that, and in its 
present phase to discuss details of that kifid is like arguing 
theology with a burglar who is not only that, but a burglar 
with a record of murder ,and on the top of that a burglar 
actively engaged in trying to kill you and your children. 
The issue before the Alliance, and especially before Great 
Britain, is an issue of victory or defeat in the field. There is 
no middle course. Since Prussia and her allies have thrown 
down a challenge to Europe, have enslaved Europeans and 
tortured them, massacred innocent noii-belligerents and 
neutrals wholesale, have broken every old and honourable 
convention which regulated warfare between Europeans, 
and have, in general, rebelled against the moral standards of 
Europe, the issue is not whether our enemies or any part of 
them shall adopt this or that one of the many experiments in 
human government (all of them imperfect) which are to be 
discovered wrecked or surviving up and down the history of 
mankind. If the enemy maintains his defence up to the 
moment of obtaining a peace which leaves him militarily 
strong and able to renew his methods, then we are defeated. 
If we are defeated the civilisation of Europe is defeated with 
us, and this country in particular will never be proud or 
strong again. On the other hand, the defeat of the enemy 
in the field, whether the enemy at that moment of defeat is 
politically organised in one fashion or another, means the 
safe-guarding and the maintenance of all the things which we 
hold dear and of these things the nation stands far and above 
any particular political arrangement of democracy or parlia- 
ments, of " responsibility of Ministers " and the rest. 
There is a strange and almost tragic lack of the sense of 
reahty in those who introduce abstract conceptions of this 
sort at such a moment. It is an absence of the sense of 
reality which you never get in private or domestic affairs 
— men don't play thus with their health or their fortunes — 
but which there is always a danger of your getting in pubHc 
affairs. And it is one to which men who have made pohtics 
their profession are particularly liable. Some men , live in 
phrases, and though the personal objects in the careers they 
have undertaken had very little to do with the phrases they 
use, yet the use of those phrases becomes so much of a habit 
as to be a second nature. It is not second nature for the mass 
of men who are supporting the terrible burden of this war, 
and that is why it always jars upon the plain citizen and still 
more upon the soldier when beheads a long discourse of which 
such phrases are the backbone. The plain man, and par- 
ticularly the soldier, has one object in view, which is the defeat 
of the enemy. He knows instinctively (and indeed the thin" 
is perfectly obvious) that there is no such thing in an affair 
of this magnitude as a draw. No possible conclusion to the 
war is conceivable which woiild not either leave the enemy 
nation humiliated, broken and weak, or the British, the 
French, and their Allies burdened with a permanent sense of 
failure. That is the plain truth, and it is a truth which ought 
not to need reiteration. 
The enemy, and especially the German enemy, and among 
Germans the Prussian in particular, who is the backbone of 
the.whole of the enemy's resistance, has here and for a long 
time had an advantage over us. He is in no doubt at all 
about what he wants or about how to obtain it. He desires 
and has desired, from the moment when he saw that his first 
plan of conquest had failed, to obtain what he would call 
*' an honourable peace." But a peace honourable to any 
party in such a struggle is necessarily a victorious peace. He 
has never wasted energy in defining and re-defining some 
abstract aim or other. His object has been and still is the 
very simple military object of maintaining his siege lines in- 
tact and of continuing his resistance to the pressure he suffers 
until those who exercise that pressure will have no more heart 
to continue the struggle. Any suggestion of compromise 
with that militMry plan is by so much a military weakness. 
It is a w-eakness to be avoided at all hazards. 
There is one idea and one only which should fill every 
mind, it is the idea of the war. And the objects and methods 
of war do not translate themselves into terms of democracy 
or autocracy or any such thing, but into terms of military 
success or military failure^Defeat or Victory ! It is at the 
peril of our national existence that we modify those simple 
terms with any exiraneous matter, or weaken our resolve with 
the admixture of any side issue. The temptation to do so 
becomes the stronger as time goes on. The enemy realises 
this weaivness of the Alliance and leaves nothing undone, 
overtly or covertlj', but more particularly covertly, to confuse 
the plain issue. The success his propaganda has achieved 
temporarily in Russia is bound to encourage him to new 
efforts. We must beware of phrases — Defeat or Victory are 
the only words to bear in mind. 
