October i8, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
general modification in the West due to the process of the war 
— or very little. The general purpose of the Western Allies 
remains what it was at the beginning. On the enemy's side 
there is a prodigious change. It is a change affecting whole 
populations and the very mind of the combination which set 
out to conquer us. They have come to an open repudiation 
of their original intention and to a negation of what seemed 
in IQ14 their ineradicable political phiiosopliy. Prussia 
(for the iirst time in all her history) is using the word "free- 
dom " and«talking of " national rights." The most enormous 
of all the enormous symptoms of the thing is the fact that 
Prussia is now at last compelled to propitiate Poland. 
That, I say, is the capital mark of the whole affair. It 
should be the foundation of our judgment to see it clearly — 
and therefore it is the great object of the enemy and his sup- 
porters, direct and indirect, at this moment to confuse us upon 
that capital point. 
They assure us that the movement is a general one ; that 
" all parties" are equally weary ; that the tone is " every- 
where " changed. So stated it is a falsehood. Obviously, 
three years of war will weary all men, victors as well as van- 
quished, more than one year. But so far as direction of effort 
is concerned, the change is a change upwn the enemy's part 
and not upon ours. And the reason is simple. It is that the 
enemy, formerly certain of victory on a purely military calcu- 
lation, is now on the same calculation equally certain of defeat. 
He has only the political avenue of escape left him, and there- 
fore he has turned to that. 
Enemy Propaganda ' 
This, then, is our conclusion on the fundamental point. 
The Peace Propaganda is an enemy propaganda. It is the 
enemy that turned to it and not we ; it is the enemy who is 
trying to drag us in to it and we who must resist. 
There follows an immediate corollary from this fundamental 
truth, which is that the statements on which this propaganda 
reposes are necessarily suspect in our eyes. When we look 
at those statements we shall find tliat our suspicion is very 
reasonable, quite apart from the fact that the proposition is 
an enemy proposition. 
The enemy statement we are considering here may be put 
thus briefly in simple words : 
" You cannot defeat me, of course ; yet I am willing to 
give you fart of the things which only defeat could wring 
from me." 
Of course, the matter is not put so simply or with a con- 
tradiction so glaring. The way it is put is : "A decision in 
the field is impossible short of mutual ruin, therefore let us 
negotiate." But the briefest and truest form of it is what 
I have said : " You cannot defeat me, of course ; but I am 
willing to give you part of the things that can only be wrung 
from me by defeat." A strange attitude ! 
The enemy, so long as he had the slightest chance of victory, 
far from conceding anything talked openly of indemnities, of 
the probable annexation of French territory, of the certain 
annexation of Belgium, of the " punishment " of Italy, and 
all the rest of the phrases with which we were exceedingly 
familiar not two years ago. Surely even public opinion 
rannot be so short-memoried as to have forgotten already 
those phrases and declarations ? Have we forgotten Bern- 
hardi's definite prophesy at the end of 1913 that, with the 
spring of 1916, France would be overrun ? Or the memoran- 
dum upon the annexation of the French ironfields in Lorraine ? 
Or the later declarations upon Belgium ? Is it possible that 
anyone can have forgotten the earlier claim to hold the 
( hannel Coast as a permanent threat against England ? Or 
the discussion of the exact amounts which a defeated Western 
civilization would have to pay ? So long as there was the 
least chance of victory* for the enemy that was the tone. 
If we'were to put the matter in plain question and answer 
it would stand somewhat thus : 
" Why did you not talk like this during the battle of 
Verdun .-' " 
" Because I then thought I could get a decision in my own 
favour." 
'Why did you not talk like this before theTrentino fiasco? " 
_" Because I did not think it would be a fiasco. I expected 
a decisive victory-, the cutting off of the whole Italian Army 
and the overrunning of the Italian cities." 
It comes then to this. So long as the chance of victory was 
"With the enemy, a decision was possible and negotiation was 
ridiculous. Now that the progress towards victory is on our 
side and against him, behold I a decision is impossible and 
negotiation is the only way out ! Really the argument is a 
little too one-sided. 
The enemy's attitude and that of his supporters and apolo- 
gists at the present moment may be compared to that of. a 
man heavily pressed for money who enters into some such 
The Creditor : " Your payment has fallen due. Can you 
pay ? Are you solvent ? " 
The Debtor : " Oh, yes ! I am quite solvent. But first 
of all let us see whether you will not rather accept something 
in the pound." 
We all know what we should think of the man who replied 
thus in a commercial matter and where his credit would stand. 
It is an exact parallel to the bluff which the enemy is putting 
up at this phase of the war. 
The truth is that the whole argument depends upon the 
statement that a decision is impossible. It is a statement 
which the enemy and his friends niake, and it is a statement 
manifestly false. 
" Permanent " Defences 
The enemy constructed his original defensive lines in the 
West with the manifest intention of holding them intact 
until he could secure an inconclusive peace. In their largest 
plan as in their details those lines are a clear confession of 
such a policy. No one who has seen the work he put into 
them can doubt that. They amounted to a declaration that 
it was worth while to do so much because doing so much gave 
him an impregnable position. 
Well, the first step was that those lines proved far Irora 
impregnable as the armament of the Allies proceeded. The 
Battle of the Somn^e was definite proof that this armament — 
then, remember, only in the middle of its expansion — could 
destroy a system it had taken the enemy two years to complete. 
He fell back upon the idea of successive trench lines ; 
the chief of them, constructed with immense labour and ob- 
viously designed for permanence, lay along the Bapaume 
Ridge. He was shot off the Bapaume Ridge almost before 
he had properly fallen back upon it. 
The next step in his decline was the determination upon 
a local retirement and the evacuation of the Noyon saUent. 
He drew across that arc a chord which is generally called the 
Hindenburg line. It staffed with the Vimy Ridge and was 
(and is) an enormous double work, including ' miles of tunnel 
and hundreds of elaborate posts constructed for permanent 
defence which ran down past St. Quentin along the Chemin des 
Dames to the neighbourhood of Rheims. tn the spring 
offensive of this year that line was broken up in place after 
place. 
That the attack did not produce a general retirement 
does not affect the argument. He built this thing as per- 
manent fortifications are built, not as field works are built, 
and yet he lost its continuity. 
Changed Tactics 
Then came, with the end of this summer, a further con- 
fession of inferiority — really the most significant of all ; 
the continually increasing fire power of the Allies and parti- 
cularly of the British, compelled him to abandon the trench 
system altogether at the point where pressure was most 
fierce. He fell back at a very heavy expense in men upon a 
system of isolated posts, of formation in depth and of repeated 
and murderously expensive counter-attacks after each sacrifice 
of ground. Whether yet another type of defence can intervene 
between this last step and the final failure of the defensive 
we do not know, but the thing is clearly progressive, and the 
progress is continually against him and in our favour. 
In a word, the doctrine that a decision is impossible is 
nonsense. If we under-estimate the time required to arrive 
at such a result, we shall naturally be disappointed. If we 
make no guess at any precise term, but appreciate the 
direction and inevitable progress of the operations, we have 
a true judgment of the situation. 
Both parties suffer. Both parties increasingly suffer. 
But the party which is now in the process of undergoing 
progressive defeat, suffers, on the civilian as on the military 
side, in material as in men, as in casualties as in moral, more 
and more, and the victors less and less. The curves are 
separating and it would be madne-ss now that that separation 
is getting accentuated to check it by accepting the enemy's 
demand for a parley and a truce. H. Belloc 
An Allied Naval Policy 
We regret to announce that more than half of Mr. 
Arthur Pollen's article on the Naval Policy of the 
Allies has been eliminated by the Censor. 
We do not consider it would be fair, either to 
Mr. Pollen or to our readers, to present his arguments 
in an incomplete form, and so we are reluctantly 
