10 
LAND & WATER 
August i6, 1 917 
be the only one, then certainly the close calculation of enemy 
effectives and reser\'es will be grossly misleading. If you 
regard the curves established by the Intelligence Departments 
of the belligerents as dead mathematical formula;, the future 
development of which will be as regular as that of a 
mathematical function described upon squared graph paper, 
you will be quite certainly as much disappointed in one case 
as you will be agreeably surprised in another. For the curve 
will never follow an exact formula- unless all the conditions 
that gave rise to it remain the same— and those conditions 
cannot remain the same. They include the moral, civilian 
and military, the co-ordination of efforts between different 
Allies, tjie political attitude of the various belligerent govern- 
ments toward their peoples and a number of other incalculable 
variants. 
They include, for instance, the consequence of movement. 
Were the enemy line to Break anywhere his losses would sud- 
denly rise enormously. Such a political event as a sort of truce 
—like that which we'suffered for months on the Russian front 
—makes them decline in almost as startling a fashion. The 
advent of a new Ally upon either side, again changes the whole 
problem ; so does the lluctuation of food supply, a good or a 
bad harvest ; so even, to some extent, do the vagaries of the 
weather. 
Reasons for Calculation 
Well, if all this is so, what is the good of making any such 
calculations ? Why are the best brains in all belligerent coun- 
tries harnessed to the work of drawing Mp estimate upon 
estimate and why are those rooms, which are the very brain- 
centres of each army, covered with mathematical diagrams 
wholly concerned with such calculations and with such calcu- 
lations alone ? 
// is because in any human endeavour the calculable part 
must have the first place. It does not give you certitude even 
in things so apparently blind as the operations of nature. It 
gives you still less certitude where the will of man comes 
in, and still less again where you have not only the fluctua- 
tions of man's will, but the accidents of battle, of climate, 
and the hundred other things that affect war. Calculation 
is not intended to give you certitude over the whole field, but 
it »s intended to give you exact knowledge over one part of 
the field and by so much to reduce the difficulties your judg- 
ment has to meet. You know by pursuing such calculations 
at least as much as can be known with accuracy of the forces 
with which you are dealing, and it is at once a duty and a ' 
necessity to know as much as can be known, although the 
other elements which can only be guessed at and very vaguely 
judged will have just as much or more weight in determining 
the issue. 
If we put the thing conversely it is even more clear. Sup- 
posing one party to a war were to use all the vast modern 
machinery of military intelligence and the calculation based 
on it, and the other party were, to neglect it, there is not the 
least doubt as to which of these two parties would win. , The 
party which neglected calculation (supposing such a thing to 
be for one instant possible) would fall into a fog and anarchy 
• of movement that would determine his immediate destruction. 
If one party had identified the positions and strength of the 
other, while that other had taken no pains to accomplish a 
corresponding task on his side, the former could immediately 
destroy the latter. He could strike when he chose and how 
he chose. 
And if this kind of thing is imperatively necessary for 
military' operations, it is hardly less useful for the formation 
of civilian opinion, upon the strength and sanity of which 
all military power ultimately depends. 
It is no exaggeration to say that if the record of enemy 
strength, man-power and reserve had been clearly followed 
by the great mass of civilians in this country during the 
present war, we should have been saved those lamentable 
variations in opinion which have been our gravest political 
weakness ; and they are almost equally a weakness when 
they tend to exaggerate hopes as when they tend to panic 
or stagnation. 
Consider, for instance, what the effect on opinion wquld 
have been if the very simple statistics published in this 
journal at the opening of the year and again last Jun(\ had 
befcn matters as commonly- appreciated by the public as is 
the war map. 
It will be remembered that we saw at the beginning of the 
year a total German ration strength of somewhat over 5', 
millions ; a fighting army of 3J millions ; a reserve of man- 
power behind this, for supplying gaps up to sometime in 
the present month, of about a million ; with the entiy of 
some 300,000 or more of the 1919 class in the later summer 
or early autumn. 
By the beginning of June we had established more tlian 
J of a million of total losses and about a third of a million of 
definitive losseswith somewhat l^ss than the difference between 
them returnable to the field in an average delay of 4 months. 
What was the conclusion from these simple and accurate 
figures ? Evidently that the enemy had under existing 
circumstances ar«d eliminating, as we are now bound to do, any 
probable heavy loss on the Russian side,- reserves available 
for meeting his losses throughout this fighting season. His 
effectives wduld not decline unless the actions determined 
upon by the Higher Command took the form of a continuous 
and very heavy pressure. The judgment of the Higher 
Command was against this form of military policy and as a 
consequence any stable judgment could deduce, from the 
figures given, that the enemj^'s reserve would prove sufficient 
for his purposes up to the latter part of the present season. 
There is another point, one of detail, in which the value of 
-such estimates will be further seen. Among the prisoners 
taken recently at the front have been a certain small number 
of German class iqiq. The interrogation of prisoners esta- 
blished the fact that these few lads were volunteers, and 
that is exactly what the known position of the igiq class 
as published in our estimates would have led us to believe. 
The drafts from 1919 cannot be generally present in the 
field so early as the beginning of August. We know that 
the first of them were not incorporated at the earliest until 
some date in May and possibly only a few of tliem before 
the beginning of June. The period of training even 
for the most advanced units would not be less than three 
months and knowledge of this kind forbids us to build 
exaggerated estimates simply upon the presence of a few 1919 
prisoners. 
The truth is that at the bottom of all misgivings about 
so essential a thing as the following of enemy numbers, 
is the natural distaste for clo.se study produced by the length 
of the war, and it is this more than anything else that has 
made this chief element in all our judgment lose its weight 
during the last few months. It is all the more our duty to 
re-act against such a tendency, for it is in the last stages of 
a war that this element of calculation is of the greatest value. 
There is another reason which makes it especially necessary 
to follow calculation at this moment : It is one to which I 
have alluded elsewh(?re in this week's issue of L.^nd & W.'\ter„ 
It is the fact that those who are working underground to 
exasperate our patience and to weaken our will largely depend 
upon the impression that the enemy is "in some miraculous 
way inexhaustible, and not subject, as are other belligerents, 
to normal losses. If opinion can be canalised into that channel 
the task of those who are indifferent to defeat and very anxious 
for peace is greatly strengthened. 
There was published the other day from the pen of a dis- 
tinguished diplomatic neutral, as he was then (who had live'd 
at the centre of things in Berlin for many months), I mean 
Mr. Gerard, the statement that the German Empire possessed 
(I think he meant in the spring of this year), at the present 
moment "Nine million effectives." This statement was 
quoted widely, and I am afraid, believed. \\ ell, that is the 
sort of statement which even an elementary public training 
in military estimates would render innocuous, but which a 
public ignorance of military estimates may render very 
dangerous. Whether the author of the phrase was using the 
technical word " effectives " as a technical word may be 
doubted. Even if he meant' by it "everybody in uniform," 
the remark was wide of the truth by more than 30 per cent. 
It was, perhaps, due to some muddling up of the total 
effectives of the enemy with those of the German Empire, and 
at the same time a muddling up of the word " effectives " 
with the phrase " ration strength." But, at any rate, the 
facts are very different. The effectives, that is the number 
of men to be found in the organised combatant units, 
including in their staffs and field auxiliaries (e.g. medical 
officers in the field) of the German Empire at the 
present moment are just over three million. The incor- 
porated reserve with which to keep these effectives up to 
strength is somewhat under half a million, and to these 
will be added in a very short time the newly trained men of 
1919, which will, within the first months of the Autumn 
count another 300,000, and may, before the end of the year 
nearly reach the half million. 
Those are the facts — enormously different from the 
fiction of " nine millions" — and 1 give 'them, as an example of 
what I rnean when I say that the repetitive study of such es- 
timates is es>;ential to a sound judgment. H. BellqC 
Letters from a Legatioii 
Owing to. the irregularity in the postal service with 
America .we are unable to publish in the present issue 
further chapters from Mr. Hugh Gihsoi's " Letters from a 
Legation." These memoirs will, however, be definitely 
resit med on A ugust ^oth. 
