LAND & WATER 
November 15, 1917 
the two great marks of this land have been absence of obstacle 
.md difficulty of siipp!\'. There is nothing interrupting move- 
ment from soiitli to north, or from north to south ; from the 
sea up into the highlands, or from the eastern desert on to the 
liighlands. No one l)as e\-er been able to defend in any 
permanent fashion the line of the Jordan against an army 
Irom the east ; no one has ever drawn a line barring entry 
from the north ; there is no natural feature suggesting a 
similar line kirring entry from the south, nor are there 
parallel jxisitions in between. Indeed, the nearest thing to 
a permanent defensive line ever established against mo\'e- 
ment in this region would seem tb be this last Turkish en- 
trenchment, the line Gaza-Beersheba, which has just been 
tm'ned and lost. The gullcys running down from the moun- 
tains to the sea, occasionally filled with water after a storm, 
normally dry or nearly dry, none of them afford a true obstac 1 > 
or line of defence. They serve excellently for an approach 
up into mountains from the lowlands. Each of them is famous 
in very early military history as a line of invasion up from 
the Philistine Plain into thp Jewish mountain land. But 
they have never permanently served as transverse lines or 
obstacles to invasion from the sonth. The truth is that in 
this country any position chosen will be an artificial position. 
There will be trenches prepared from the mountains down 
to the sea, covering whatever the enemy may regard as of 
political importance or as suitable bases of supply— probably 
the latter. 
It is in this second factor, that not of obstacle but of supply, 
that you get the core of military history in this region. Even 
to-day, with the immense resources of modern engineering 
and of modern science, the difficulty of supply is the whole 
business, and in the difficulty of supply the chief item is water 
for a force advancing from the south. A large force thus ad- 
vancing to-day is tied, of course, to its railway, but also to 
its water pipe. The supplies of water increase as one goes, 
northward, but water is always the problem : much less so 
happily, at this season of the year than in summer. For 
the rainy season of Palestine is that we are now passing 
through. It ends with April, and the late spring and summer 
months are usually cloudless. 
From the point of view of the enemy or of the defensive, 
the problem of supply is different. The enemy is falling back 
upon better and better water supply, and along an e.xisting 
railway. Let us see from the configuration of that railway 
and of the roads coupled with his probable political interests, 
why he has chosen this line. 
The main railway runs on the shelf of the hills above the 
sea plain — the plain which the Philistines held in Biblical 
times. The British have been moving up this main line above 
Beersheba. They now find themselves in front of the new 
Turkish line, and that line is clearly planned first for the 
advantage of lateral supply and next to cover Jerusalem. 
The railway branch from the junction of el Tineh we may 
neglect — it is mainly in Bi itish hands, and its last fragment is 
under fire. With the branch serving Jerusalem it is other- 
wise. As the line runs, this line is his main support, and he has 
further, immediately along his front, the Beit Jilsin-Hebron 
Road. If the enemy will stand with the Jerusalem branch 
at his back as a lateral communication serving his line, it will 
be a solution for him of the problem of supply. 
The Conditions of Victory— V 
Restoration : Reparation : Guarantees 
GREAT, and especially unexpected successes ir 
the course of any war, and especially in the later 
j.hases of "any war have, apart from their material 
results, two moral effects upon the party against 
whom tliey are won. The first of these moral effects is the 
lowering of confidence. Victory breeds victory and defeat 
breeds defeat, because confidence in leadership, in the power 
to attain objects aimed at, etc., increases with the one and 
declines with the other. The second moral consequence is 
allied to this and consists in a confusion of aims, in a blurring 
or rather a disturbance of the political scheme for which war 
was waged. Considerable and especially unexpected victories 
in the later part of a campaign give to the party that wins 
them a still clearer view of its objects, while their opponents 
suffer not so much a reduction in their aims as a disarray in 
them. 
The tremendous blow now being dealt by the enemy across 
the Venetian Plain is an e.\act case in }>oint. It was certainly 
unexpected by him as by us. It has had exactly the moral 
results I have just mentioned, and it is our whole duty at the 
present moment to re-act against those moral results. 
This is particularly true of the aims set before us in this 
war. There can be no question of reducing them, because 
they are the necessary basis of security. The practical 
aim is the destruction of the Prussian military machine, and 
if that cannot be done we have lost the war. If it can be 
done and only if it can be done, shall we be in the position to 
re-establish civilisation securely for the future. 
In the formation of that future security we have said that 
the first point was the necessity for victory in the field — 
without it all the rest is talk. The second point, the practical 
fruit of such victory, is liest represented in the formula laid 
dow^n by the last administration of this country : " Restora- 
tion, reparation and guarantees." 
Rcstoiation simply signifies the giving up of those terri- 
tories which the Prussian military machine has seized from its 
rightful owners, from which it has expatriated original in 
habitants, and which it has attempted to colonise with its 
own subjects. It further includes territories long held against 
fhe will of their inhabitants by the present Allies of Prussia, 
It has nothing whatever to do with the evacuation of territorv 
temporarily and accidentally occupied during war. Such 
territory is often an asset which is used to bargain with when 
wars end in a truce or in an inconclusive peace. In other 
words, each party is really ready to yield what nothing but 
the chance of a few months has given him, and what a pro- 
longation of the war might very well lose him. Territories on 
which he never calculated when he made war, and without 
which he can still remain exccedinglv strong after the war. 
With incorporated territory, territory seized by formal 
treaty of conquest, depopulated, re-colonised and the rest of 
it, it is another matter. The restoration of such territory is at 
once the symbol of our victory and a necessary part of our 
guarantees. We are fighting a Power which has, for two 
hundred years, quite openly maintained the principle that a 
European Power may, if it can, seize territory by force from 
a neighbour without so much as a legal excuse or fictitious 
claim. The Power which we are fighting regards that prin- 
ciple as vital. It has lived bv that principle and its success 
has largely obliterated in the European conscience the old 
sanctities of treaty. So that most modern men have come 
to think of what they call " Annexation " as a sort of evil 
normal to all European history, while some are so ignorant as 
to believe that the abolition of it would be something modern 
and " progressive." The truth is, of course, that mere 
annexation by force from Europeans by Europeans is a modem 
evil, and that modern evil was created by the Power we are 
fighting to destroy. The idea upon* which it reposes is a 
Prussian idea. 
Behind this particular example of Prussianism there is 
another larger principle of which Prussia is also the support, 
though not the ongmator. It is the principle that dvnastic 
claims, or the claims of self-conscious communities against 
alien governments are fantastic and vain, and that the only 
real test of the right to govern is the material effect of govern- 
ment. It would puzzle the supporters of this theory who are 
now to be found everywhere and who, since 1870, have held 
nearly all the field of political thought in Europe, to define 
what they meant by the material well-being of a community 
Probably, if we could make them write down clearly what 
