November i, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
I 
LAND & WATER 
OLD SERJEANTS' INN, LONDON, W.C. 
Telephone HOLBORN 2828. 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER I, 1917 
CONTENTS 
Page. 
The Ameri/:an Revelations. By Louis Raemaekers i 
Crisis of the War. (Leader^ 3 
The ItaHan Peril. By Hilaire Belloc 4 
Russia The Incomprehensible. By Charles E. Russell 7 
Alsace-Lorraine — II. By Philippe Millet 10 
Italy's Hour of Peril. Bv Lewis R. Freeman li 
Our Right Flank. By H.Collinson Owen 13 
Joseph Conrad. By Arthur Symons 14 
The Guest Night. By Etienne ^5 
Edward Thomas. By J. C. Squire 17 
Books of the Week. ' 18 
Italy's Aerial Cableways (Photographs). IQ 
Domestic Economy. 21 
Kit and Equipment. 25 
Page 16 Advts. 
THE CRISIS OF THE WAR 
THE AUiance of civilised Europe is passing through 
a critical moment. Its gravity is recognised every- 
where, though it is recognised in different degrees. 
The enemy has broken a portion of tlie Italian front. 
He has defeated one army of our Allies. He has turned their 
original hne, and has compelled a general retreat. He has 
for the first time in over three years restored for some days 
a war of movement upon the West. He has captured in a 
successful struggle of only three days a hundred thousand 
prisoners and 700 guns. Consequent upon this blow he 
aims at achieving in the case of Italy something of the 
political result he achieved in the case of Russia. To the 
extent in which he can achieve his full political ends in Italy, 
to that extent he calculates that his forces can later be con- 
centrated against the British and the French armies, and 
that he may thus become numerically the superior of those 
forces. Such is the situation. 
The issue is very close indeed, because for the first time 
we are realising to the fuU what is meant by the inaction of 
Russia. We are faced by a strength which may now generally 
prove our equal, and it is working upon interior lines and upon 
chosen fronts. The immediate future shows no reltef from 
that situation. It is time, if ever it was, to confirm within 
ourselves the fi.xed resolve that no trial the West may have to 
suffer will ever compel it to give way to the enemies of civilisa- 
tion. Those words are not rhetoric to-day. They are a 
real and solemn appeal. There is no room left for discussion 
or for the miserable irritant which insignificant sheltered 
men with mad theories of an unreal bookish world plagued 
us with all last summer. Every energy must be concen- 
trated for the moment upon the offensive-defence. 
Only a week ago, before this blow fell, we were, in this 
country, recalling the famous actions which will mark 
throughout history the close of the month of October in 
the year 1914. Those actions, we remembered, decided 
the last form of siege warfare in the West. They closed 
the gate to the ports of the Channel. They saved the 
Straits of Dover. They completed that pinning of the enemy 
to earth which had been begun by the Battle of the Marne. 
The victory was achieved principally by the old and small 
regular army from tliis country, and the peculiar glory of 
the battle consisted in this : That the old regular army here 
* met (on the same ridge which is now the prize of the contest 
in Flanders) forces overwhelmingly superior to its own and 
forces which despised the traditional armour of the English. 
The attempt of those forces to break the €3ritish line failed 
against the national character and the restrictf^d but highly 
tempered weapon which was its product and its symbol. 
To-day, under very different circumstances, we have yet 
the same moral forces upon which to rely and, if we are wise. 
we can see the great issue far more clearly than we could see 
it in those critical hours of which the afternoon of Saturday, 
October 31st, 1914, was the climax. There is a sense in which 
this clearer vision makes our present task harder. We know 
far better now than we did then that it is truly life or death 
for England. We see far more clearly now than we did then 
that success or failure in arms is never a foregone conclusion, 
but lies upon the knees of the gods. It is a harder task than 
it was then, because long months of war, mourning through- 
out the country, the mere fatigue of such a strain, the increas- 
ing disabilities of living, reduce the elasticity of the national 
soul. And it is again a harder task in this : that the distance 
of the events now in progress, the geographical separation 
from our Flanders front of the Italian field where a decision 
hangs in the balance, warps our judgment. It is diflicult 
for us to realise the full significance of what is passing on the 
level, baked arena of that vast and splendid amphitheatre, 
the tfers of which are the encircling of the Julian Alps. It is 
there, in the same flat, autumn land, which saw Alaric first 
passing and suffered the ravage of Attila, that civilisation is 
again at stake — as it was at stake three years ago on Attila's 
other battlefield of ultimate defeat at Chalons and the Mame. 
May the omen serve. 
Next after the full reinforcing of the national will for the 
trials that lie before us, it should be our chief concern to 
estimate fully, without self-illusion, without panic, above aU 
without the detestable habit of self-praise, the weight of 
what is happening those hundreds of miles away in Friuli 
and the mountain-guarded Venetian Plain. Every English- 
man must seize for himself and clearly appreciate the nature 
of what has already passed. The success of the enemy is far 
greater — in mere numerical computation, let alone in signi- 
ficance — than anything the war has yet seen in the same com- 
pass of space and time. He has won a much greater victory 
than Ta^nenberg. He has done far more than was done 
by him in his first effort against Verdun, or than the French 
and British have done in any one of their attacks of corrie- 
sponding duration. He has dode more thsin he did in any 
one action of the Polish campaign, and he has done it not in 
the empty wastes of Eastern Europe, but on the crowded 
and vital soil of Italy. He has suddenly, at a moment when 
the moral of his civilian and military populiation had fallen 
to a dangerous point, presented them with great news of 
victory. He has changed in a week the whole temper of 
his forces, and even his Higher Commands to-day envisage 
the war after a fashion wholly different from that in which 
they envisaged it a brief seven days ago. 
These words are written three days before they will be 
in the hands of our readers. Those three days will be the 
critical days of the campaign. It may be that the enemy 
advance will find itself checked upon the Friulian Plain, and 
that after grievous loss in men and material, our Allies will 
re-establish their line further to the West. It may be, on the 
contrary, that the pursuit shall be so vigorously bandied as to 
forbid this rally and to produce results far graver and more 
decisive than any we have seen. It may even be that a wai 
of movement, having been thus restored in the Italian low- 
lands, the event will turn against the enemy, and that 
manoeuvre will recover what siege tactics had lost. We 
cannot tell. The event will decide. But what we ioiust none 
of us do is to flatter ourselves that actions of this magnitude, 
and proceeding at this speed, upon any part of the Western 
front, are without an immediate effect upon the whole of it. 
If the enemy achieves his object in Italy, the whole situation 
of the war is changed and turned against us. This should 
surely be clear to all. That it is not everywhere grasped with 
equal facility is due to the many impediments of distance, of 
diverse national character, of attention concentrated upon 
other fields — above all of a fear to face facts. Those im- 
pediments it is the immediate duty of all honest and patriotic 
publicity to remove. As laccessary as it was some months 
ago to stem the stupid and dangerous forces of panic and 
irresolution when foolish men talk wildly of an advance on 
India and the rest of it, so necessary is it now to counteract 
confusion of thought and slowness. of thought in the public 
appreciation of our grave peril. The more soberly and 
thoroughly we realise the peril, the better we shall be able to 
meet iv. 
