August 2, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
A Review of the Third Year of the War 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THE third year of the Great War comes to a close 
(according as we calculate '.from the first diplomatic 
or the first military aqt- of hostilities) on July 31st 
or August 4th. ' • ',-' ' ■ ■ " . . , ^ 
This third year of the war/if it be' looked at m its largest 
aspect, will be seen to have been- dominated by two great 
governing conditions. 
The first of these conditions has been the relative dechne 
of the enemy's numerical power, and this relative dechne has 
applied not only to his effectives as a whole, but to his man- 
power in general, including his. power of munitionment, and 
his power of further production. The general effect of 
this first condition, which is r fundamentally determinant of 
the whole campaign, will be discussed in a moment. 
Its effect has ■ been profoundly modified by the second 
governing condition of the vear, which has been the Revolu- 
tion in Russia. This political movement, whatever its ultimate 
effects may be, has for the, period under review changed all 
the calculation upon which the Allies have hitherto pro- 
ceeded. The enemy enjoyed an ■ almost complete repose 
between the Baltic and the Black Sea for many months. 
There was a proportionate drop in tlie curve of his casualties. 
He was able to reinforce to some extent his Western front 
while his Eastern front became a sort of great rest camp or 
" especially quiet sector " to which could be sent troops who 
had suffered from the superiority of the Wesfern Alhes. 
There is the story of the third, year.. The war has been a 
s-ege since the enemy was .thrown back on the Marne and 
had the door locked upon him upon the Yser. . But it differed 
for long from most sieges in this •., that it was a siege in which 
the besieged were at first numerically the most powerful and 
far superior in munitionment . to the besiegers, and which 
lad therefore, to be most carefully conducted lest, in the 
process of exhausting the besieged, the besiegers themselves 
should break down. , •„ n . 
It was a siege then, in which for at least the first year a 
much stronger man was being kept down upon the ground by 
a weakerman. The second year was. the year of conversion^ 
It was the vear during which the attempt of the besieged 
to reverse. the siege conditions before it should be too late, 
was most violent. It included what may be called the four 
great sorties (though one of them began before the end of 
that year) : The thrust to the East ; the thrust to the 
^gean ; the thrust upon the sector of Verdun ; the thrust 
against the Trentino. , x- r 1 j tu^ 
In the mihtary sense all those great sorties failed^ The 
containing hnes remained still containing the enemy. He had 
broken them nowhere, though he had come uncomnionly 
close to breaking them in the effort at Mlna m the autumn 
of IQ15 ; and though he had come again uncommonly close to 
breaking them at the very end of the second year, when he 
just failed to effect a rupture of the Italian lines. 
The third year would have seen his destruction but for the 
political effect of one of these so0ies,„that against Russia. 
Already before the third year opened the enemy had found 
on the =omme that superiority .had passed to the Western 
AUies. Before the end of that . tremendous ^.^pl^ ^^ ^^ 
embarrassed as to reinforcement,- upon the West^ Already 
upon the East, before the third Y^a'" «Pf^d. he had seen 
forty divisions disappear under the hand of Brussilof . There 
remained to him just^nough surplus v'tahty to carry out the 
restricted offensive against the new Roumanian front and 
there ihen appeared to be nothing for him at all but a gradually 
^Te^^^tafrall^Sember, an open and detailed appeal 
for neace to his enemies at the close of 1910. Ihat appeal 
was'^of c'ou?se re Sd, but (we shall do -ell.to rem be- 
to-day) it was not only rejected but ^f^^/f ^rfain crir^e 
firm, wise and lucid. He had ^07^^"'=? , f, "'/.'"'J' '" ^ 
He must pay such a penalty as will forbid his ever committ 
ing such a crime again. . , ;4.„.-,c of thp 
Had the situation remained.poht.cally what it ^as at the 
close of 1916 ; had we been dealing through the opening season 
of 1917 with an unchanged and determined alliance agam^ 
the common foe, the end was not only certain but was near, 
when the Revolution in Russia changed ail^ 
The siege of the rebellious Central \"^pires and their Alfs 
by the combined civilisation of Europe, lost tscontinmiy. 
For months the largest sector of the ^'fj J^g. f ^!,f„ '^U 
" wear down " the force opposed to it : -;oj^^°'l^j';u",P°"^as 
the 1,000 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea there wa. 
exercised no pressure upon the bc^egccl. <-„norioritv of 
In spite of this grave defection the mcrcas mg ^^"P'^™;''^^. 
the older and better civUisation in the south and VNCst im 
pressed itself, when the Western offensive of 1917 opened. 
Every blow broke in his defences and was not recoverable. 
And the last weeks of the third year of the war saw him 
upon the West threatened with disaster from the increasing 
superiority of his foes. But the Eastern front was no longer 
calculable. 
Russia and Roumania 
The details of the year must now be tabulated in their 
order. 
They resolve themselves clearly, as we have seen, into two 
parts very sharply defined by the outbreak of the Russian 
Revolution. 
In the first part, during which every member of the Gra.nd 
Alliance was working in concert with the rest, the pressure 
steadily .increased upon the enemy until he saw disaster in- 
evitable in the year 1917, called for peace and failed to obtain 
it, took to methods of desperation. 
The second part saw a profound modification of these 
favourable conditions, the weight of the war thrown upon 
the Western Powers and the regular curve of its progress.^ so 
disturbed that all previous calculations failed. 
As the third year opened the great advance of Brussilof 
upon the East was approaching its term. The Germans 
had been compelled to throw in some forty divisions, but 
their action saved their AUies. 
During the, course of August 1916, Brussilof somewhat 
advanced his . line, especially compelling Bothmer in the 
southern centre to retire somewhat, and before the end of the 
month the advance had been continued south of the Dniester 
sufiiciently to include Stanislaus. 
It was at this limit, as it were, of the great Russian offensive 
that the Roumanian Government decided to enter the fidd, 
and upon August 27th declared war upon Austria-Hungary, 
a declaration which was followed upon the next day, August 
28th,, by Germany's declaring war against Roumania. But 
Roumania was entirely dependent upon Russian communi- 
cations for her munitionment. Was that munitionment 
loyally provided by the old pre-Revolution Government 
of Russia? It is a question which, of course, affects the 
whole character of what followed, but one which the present 
writer has not at this moment any ground for deciding one 
way or the other. At any rate, the upshot of the campaign 
was an invasion of Roumania, which occupied the capital 
and more than half the fertile land, and reached " the lines 
of the Sereth." 
The Roumanian forces first proceeded to occupy the passes 
of the Carpathians and to attempt an invasion. of Transyl- 
vania, a purely political effort, very ill designed from the point 
of view of general strategy, and excused by its originators 
to the other Allies on the plea that only the presence of 
Roumanian troops in Translyvania with its Roumanian 
population could make the war tolerable to the mass of the 
Roumanian people.' As should have been foreseen, the 
Bulgarians quite shortly after the opening of the campaign, 
struck against the Dobrudja. Accompanied by Turkish 
and German contingents they moved up the Danube in an 
effort to reach the great bridge of Cerna Voda and destroyed 
four Roumanian divisions on the way, but a counter-blow 
delivered upon September 21st checked them. 
Roumania, though already suffering ' heavily . from the 
pressure of superior forces, still apparently retained a suffi- 
cient stock in munitionment to hold the mountains and the 
essential Danube Bridge. Meanwhile, this month of Sep- 
tember also saw the continuation of the tremendous pressure 
which the Western Allies were putting upon the German 
Army in the battle of the Somme, fand the continuous bom- 
bardment which filled the month was crowned at its close ]^ 
the advance to the highest points of the Ridge in front of 
Bapaume The ruins of Combles were occupied and the 
battle up hill which was the first part of the Somme operations 
The real effect, of course, of all that Somme offensive, 
which covered from first to last not less than five months 
was the attrition of the enemy's forces, the infliction of 
casualties which were no less than 700,000 men. Progress 
of the AUied pressure and its severity is to be judged by the 
advance of the Hne into a further and deeper concave towards 
the ridge of Bapaume, and this continued uninterruptedly. 
The autumn mud just saved the enemy's line in front of the 
B-ipaumc Ridge, but left him with the knowledge that short 
of some great political change he could not hold upon the 
same line in the coming spring. October saw the beginning 
