August 2, I917 
LAND & WATER 
severe fighting against his rearguard, and on Saturday, the 
loth, the first elements of the British force entered and occu- 
pied Bagdad. 
Contemporaneously with this action, with the retirement 
of the Germans from the Noyon salient, and with the last 
and successful eftorts of the enemy to push forward somewhat 
in Roumania, coincidently also with the first appearance of 
the German class 1918 on the divisional I organisations, 
after three or three and a half months of training, there 
took place the event which changed the whole face of the 
war, andthat in a degree which to-day we are only beginning 
to realis'e. I mean the Russian revolution. Upon Marcli 
i6th, 1917, Western Europe received a message from the 
new Revolutionary Government of Russia that the Czar had 
lost his throne and was a prisoner, and that the Government 
to which foreign Allied Governments must address themselves 
was the Ministry responsible to the D=ma. 
With the domestic nature of this great event we are not 
here concerned, but it behoves us, if we are to mark what 
followed, to appreciate what resulted in the matter of miHtary 
disciphne among the Russian forces, and for that purpose 
I beg my readers to admit some digression upon the nature 
of this element in military affairs, and the consequences of 
its dissolution, 
REVOLUTION AND DISCIPLINE 
To understand the effect of this event upon the purely 
military course of the war, it is essential to detach one's niind 
from all other than military considerations and to consider 
what it is that gives executive force to an army. 
An army is an assembly of men working under conditions 
abnormal to human life. It is an assembly, the efficiency of 
which for its own purpose, depends upon exactitude and 
rapidity of movement. Secondly : An army is an assembly 
of men subject to an unnatural strain. Lastly, an army 
involves in its exercise perpetual inequaUty of treatment. 
Most must be subject to a few and of the few each, 
though commanding, must be subject to some other. 
Those individuals of an army selected upon a particular day 
for the most painful tasks are to suffer the greatest strain, 
suffer inequality as compared with their more fortunate 
fellows. Within the army one category will necessarily 
be more subject to pain, to peril or to death than another. 
These three main characteristics of an army, which make 
it the exceptional thing it is among human assembhes, create 
the idea of military discipline which is for an army a sheer 
necessity. You must somehow produce a state of affairs 
in which each unit of the assembly acts for the advantage 
of the whole, and often bitterly to his cost, and as a result of 
immediate obedience to an order given. 
Without this mechanical and unreasoning element the 
machine could not work. To put a simple case. One 
hundred men could not, through the highest patriotism or 
the most developed intelligence, form fours of themselves by 
voluntary action. 
When we discuss the tactical or strategical elements of 
a military situation we take for granted the existence lof 
military disciphne. 
The disappearance or the weakening of this element of 
discipline brings into military problems a point quite separate 
from all tactical or strategic judgment. I can say, for 
instance, in writing of the campaign of 1792 : " The Prussian 
army cannot turn Dumouriez until they have reduced the 
fortress of Verdun which blocks their advance ; therefore, 
there is full time for Dumouriez to call up additional forces." 
■ That would be a sound strategical statement of the posi- 
tion a few days before Vahny. But it takes for granted 
that Verdun is held by a highly discipUned garrison and that 
the troops in its neighbourhood which can be called into its 
defence are of the efficiency which military discipline pro- 
duces. As a matter of fact, discipline was absent and Verdun 
was surrendered almost without a fight. Sound, therefore, 
as the strategical statement would have been, it took for 
granted a moral element which did not exist. 
Now it is the character of every democratic revolution to 
relax discipline at its outset. This is inevitable because no 
man can wholly disassociate personal from political freedom, 
and because to most men freedom means individual free- 
dom almost alone. Freedom is obedience to a self-made law. 
Any nation or community hitherto unfree and attempting 
freedom, must destroy the old and hitherto existing form of 
authority. But the disappearance of the known and accustomed 
authority leaves the individual free to react for the moment 
in his own interests alone and to forget the common cause. 
In the case of military discipline, what happens in the first 
stages of a democratic revolution is always the same. The 
foundation of that disciphne is debated and therefore is relaxed. 
So far as the purely military problem presented by the 
phenomenon is concerned, its cliief factor after the extent of 
the relaxation is tne duration in time of thatj relaxation. The 
most egalitarian | democracy conceivable may impose — and 
many such democracies as an historical fact have imposed — 
the most severe military disciphne upon its army. Super- 
fically there is condradiction between the two things, but 
fundamentally there is not ; for the members of the democracy 
may well grasp the paradox that in order to preserve their 
own freedom they must have a covering institution, the 
internal organisation of which is unfree ; just as a fluid body 
which would keep together must be contained within a solid 
receptacle. It is not true, therefore, that a democratic 
revolution necessarily destroys or weakens the miUtary 
value of its own army in a permanent fashion. Bt)t it is true 
that it weakens it at the outset, and the duration of that period 
of weakness is all-important to the task which the army has 
to perform : For all military things are measured by number 
and by time. 
The Russian Revolution weakened this military factor 
upon the Allied side heavily, and that for a considerable 
period. The causes of this were as follows : 
First : It came after a period of intense strain, affected 
armies which had lost enormously and had been compelled 
to months of- retreat. The retreat was successful ii> a miHtary 
sense. The integrity of the Russian armies was maintained 
and their line remained unbroken. But the individual 
soldier did not feel it. 
Secondly : The Revolution of itself was conducted by a 
portion of the army, to wit, the garrison of St. Petersburg. 
Thirdly : The democratic ideals underlying this Revolution 
were not, as in the case of the French Revolution, entirely 
concerned with the political emancipation of the whole nation, 
but very largely with the economic emancipation of the 
poorer citizens and with a number of ideals which had nothing 
to do with nationahty and were indeed often opposed to 
that ideal. 
Fourthly ! The Revolution broke out in a community 
which was not homogeneous and affected armies which were 
not the armies of one nation. 
Looking at what used to be called the Russian Empire 
upon the map, we may speak of the Russian nation as 'occupy- 
ing in Europe no more than its north-central portion. Fin- 
land, already separated in its form of Government, formed no 
part of the Russian nation, nor did the Baltic provinces nor 
the Lithuanian, nor the Polish. The whole southern belt 
of Ukraine was in its majority a community different from the 
central part, though the degree of difference is a matter 
which we in the West cannot easily test. A large and active 
Jewish nation of several millions was at work throughout 
the west and south, German-speaking, not Russian at all. 
The effect of this weakening of disciphne upon the Eastern 
front was positively very grave ; negatively it had less effect 
than might have been expected, and that for reasons that 
will presently be shown. 
Positively, it did two things. It eliminated the Russian 
power for the offensive until an advanced date in the fighting 
season of 1917, and it permitted the enemy to use the Eastern 
front as a sort of " Rest Camp," to which divisions mauled 
in the West could be transferred and frocm which other 
divisions fresh from long repose could be brought against the 
French and Enghsh. 
Effect on the Alliances J 
Military operations upon a considerable scale are possible 
upon the Eastern front when the ground has dried after the 
spring thaw, and this means, roughly speaking. May south of 
the Pripet marshes and June to the north of them. But it 
was not until July ist that any action was urnlertaken, and 
when such action was undertaken, it was at once partial and 
troubled by mutiny. The northern armies did not move. 
The southern armies, though enjoying numerical superiority 
and better munitionment than they had had since the 
beginning of the war, saw their offensive movement immedi- 
ately interrupted by internal disorders. 
From the moment that the Revolution declared itself the 
enemy began withdrawing all that could possibly be spared 
from the Eastern front in the way of mem and, of course, a 
much larger proportion of artillery and of munitionment. Per- 
haps as many as twenty divisions were thus affected. When 
the strain upon him began in the West, that is, from the first 
half of April, 1917, onwards, we find the enemy — not upon 
the large scale which popular imagination has conceived, 
but still in a degree sufficient to affect the Allied cause 
adversely — sending to the Eastern front for repose divisions 
which had broken down under the strain of the West, and 
conversely bringing divisions westward which had enjoyed 
the repose of the Eastern front and were fresh. 
The positive side, therefore, the effect of the Revolution 
was very grave for the Allied cause, and heavi^ counter- 
