LAND & WATER 
September 20, 191^ 
A Chapter of Unwritten History 
By Hilaire Belloc 
THERE has been no movement of importance upon 
any front this week, and perhaps the chief item of 
purely mihtary news is the welcome publication, 
after too long a delay, of the French official figures 
of German losses, drawn up in the course of the summer. 
The truth with regard to the statistical position of the enemy 
has, of course, been perfectly well known for a long time past 
and has been repeatedly described in these columns, but 
official pronouncement has a weight which no private student 
can claim, however excellent the sources of his information. 
Those who ha\e followed the statistics printed in L.\>.n 
& \V.\TER will see that the official French statistics communi- 
cated to the English Press last Friday are identical in their 
conclusions with those given here, save that the French 
estimate of totally mobilised German numbers is slightly 
inferior to that which has been arrived at in this journal. We 
hava always taken the yield of the younger German classes 
to be 500,000. The French official estimate puts it at only 
450,000. With this exception the conclusions arrived at are 
the same, showing a balance at the present moment (ex- 
cluding class i<)2o), of 5i million men upon the Hsts of the 
Cierman army, of whom about 3J million form the organised 
divisions in the field. 
In the absence of active operatbns affording material 
comment, perhaps my readers will allow mc to present them 
with a piece of fiction. 
I received this week from a correspondent, the quotation 
from a newspaper which represents the Pacifists in the United 
States and called The New Republic : 
As long as alUed Generals and statesmen insist on the need 
of a military decision thc\' ])ostponc, or perhaps prevent, 
the victory which still lies within tlieir grasp. 
This is writing of a sort we arc already painfully familiar 
with from the pens of certain intellectuals on our own side of 
the Atlantic — the cry for a negotiated peace and for a distinc- 
tion between a wicked "' Kaiser " and his excellent and 
friendly subjects, who only obey the orders of their superiorswith 
shame and reluctance and whom it is our mission to set free. 
We are happily also even more familiar with the plain 
truth that there is no necessity for such a surrender, and that 
the armies are sufficient to their task, and that the only peril 
of shame can come from such weakness in civilians. What 
I have done in the sketch that follows is to imagine a future 
historian setting down the negotiation, and the consequence 
of such a shameful peace. 
My conclusions as to what that surrender would mean, will 
seem to some perhaps exaggerated. I believe them to be in 
the main true, especially as regards this country. 
THE abrupt decline of European civilisation, which falls 
like a catastrophe upon the early twentieth century, is the 
most obvious thing in history. It is the cardinal point 
of every elementary textbook and the universal commonplace 
even of those who have least knowledge of the past. 
In its main general lines, the popular conception of this 
great event is the true one. After a period of increasing 
instability in the European States, and just at the close of 
their most brilliant material development, two of them in 
confederacy suddenly forced war upon their neighbours. 
That war was of unprecedented magnitude. It reached an 
inconclusive end. Immediately — or almost immediately — 
after it, there is a collapse, in which all that men did and 
thought, the arts, the sciences, letters, fell into an abyss. 
Nothing recovered. We come upon a confused period, the 
very few cited dates of which are uncertain and the length 
of which, though it is known to extend over many centuries, 
is variously estimated by even the best scholars. We rise at 
last again into that new period of high civilisation, Which we 
at present enjoy, corresponding, after so great a lapse of time, 
to the old one which fell. 
Those who tell this main fact of history even in its briefest 
form to our school-children, and all who allude to it even in 
the simplest of popular works, rightly insist upon the mark of 
rapidity which stamped it. The other great changes which 
set terms to historical development cover, some of them, 
several generations. The most swift and fundamental — the 
Reformation, for instance — covered not less than the long 
lifetime of a mao- But this, the greatest change of all, was 
the affair of quite a few years. 
During the first quarter of the twentieth centurj', both the 
precision and the scale of human effort in Europe were at 
their highest. There had been a heavy decline in taste, if 
you will, but everything remaining to us proves not the 
decline but the actual increase of material power. The build- 
ings are larger, the communications more rapid, the whole 
economic effort more intense and, apparently, better founded 
than ever it had been before. The war and its futile ending 
follow. 
Then there comes — in the second and third quarter of the 
century — that curious blank interval, of which we can make 
nothing : of which no permanent monument survives in any 
form, however ruined, and of which the very meagre accounts 
are so contradictory, and, in places, so incredible, that they 
cannot be used as a foundation for historica' statement. 
When we emerge from this blank towards the year 2,000 
everytloing is changed. 
For a hundred documents belonging to the early nineteen 
hundreds, we have now perhaps one. The style has grown 
difficult and impoverished. Humanity has turned r sharp 
corner, as it were, and lost sight of its own past. Tiiere 
begins with the twenty-first century that long period of twilight 
or darkness of which, as I have said, one cannot even properly 
determine the leading dates. A ruined society, enormously 
diminished in numbers and reduced to the simplest form, 
drags itself doubtfully through the ages. The vocabulary 
has dwindled away to a few hundred words : forests re-arise ; 
the old marshes are flooded again. Piracy reappears upon 
the sea : and, at the same time, more than one novel barbaric 
institution, the working of which we can hardly understand 
to-day, rises to support the lessened world. 
So much, I say, is the commonest of common knowledge. 
But if the modem student will go a little deeper and will 
ask himself, Why so enormous a result was produced and that 
so rapidly ? And then How it took place ? He will find both 
those questions most imperfectly answered. 1 should be 
inclined to say, for my own part, that he will find them 
answered not at all, but shirked, or regarded as insoluble. 
Yet they are the only questions of real interest which a 
serious student of history can ask himself about any event, 
great or small. Why did it happen ? How did it happen ? 
It is worth remarking that the same difficulty in a lesser 
degree has been found attaching to other examinations of 
history. In the long past it is a complaint we continually 
find amongst those who study the advent of the Christian 
Church, or the Rise of Mohammedanism, or the great change 
called the Reformation, that though one could see what had 
happened and could set down in order the steps of itsr pro- 
gress, the explanation of it — the how and the why — were the 
great questions of all never properly solved. 
Now, I do not propose to solve those questions completely 
in the case of this, the greatest of all such problems. But 
recent research and the two great new monographs which 
have appeared in the last five years do give us at least some 
idea of the process, and especially of the rapidity, with which 
the thing worked. 
Briefly, the catastrophic nature of the result was due to a 
change in the character of the war, which change marked 
its fourth year. The great war came in that fourth year, 
froin the late summer of 1917 onwards, to be looked at by the 
various belligerents, but particularly by those of what we 
now call the Western Alliance,* in a fashion quite different 
from that in which the original members of that Alliance had 
first conceived it. 
That is the root of the whole affair — and yet that is the 
point most difficult for us to-day to understand. 
All men tend to reaci history backwards and to forget that 
what are to us known facts were to the men we are historically 
examining, an unknown future. 
We can hardly conceive to-day how it was possible for 
men who had set out with one clear objective of overwhelming 
importance, to change their minds so rapidly. We are 
bewildered when we find the very same public speakers and 
writers maintaining in 1918 almost the opposite of what they 
had maintained not four short years before. We are 
astonished that what are, to us, the obvious and simple 
• The common phrase used in our textbooks " Western Alliance ' ' 
IS not found among contemporary writers. The original belligerents 
are usually named by these the Central Powers on the one hand and 
the Allies, or the " Entente Powers " on the other ; with the adhesion 
of the Turks and the Bulgarians to the one part, of the Italians and, 
later, the Americans to the other, and with the changed attitude of 
what had been the Russian Eiripire, no convenient term was framed 
by belligerents for those who still maintained the struggle, but our 
modern phrase "the Western Alhance " is at once accurate and 
comiireliensive. 
