Septemoer 13, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
upon the West ; and when we add to this the disproportion 
in the amount of enemy shell delivered on the West and East 
respectiveh' we have again an unknown ratio, but one which 
is certainly higher than five to one. 
A general summary of the situation is, then, that though 
the Central Powers have proved tlieir superiority upon the 
East, thev have at the same time proved their inferiority 
against the older and better civilisation of the \\ est and Soutli 
of Europe, from which they themselves drew still their culture. 
The war in its maturity has discovered what was perhaps 
to be expected from the very nature of Europe. That 
European civilisation which has ever spread eastward and 
northward from the Mediterranean has vindicated itself ; 
and where the tradition of that civilisation has been most con- 
stant, there in the long run has military power proved greatest. 
It is a general conception which is clouded by a mass of detail, 
and which at first was obscured by the fact that the aggressor 
was prepared while his intended victims were not prepared. 
But the long process of the war now enables us to eliminate 
the first paradox whereby the Germans and their depen- 
dents seemed at first the military superiors of those who had for 
ages been their masters. The same long process of the war 
enables us to distinguish between the general cause and its 
detailed effects. Those effects we may call superior munition- 
mertt, colonial resources, sea power, better communications, 
etc., etc., but they all of them spring ultimately from the fact 
that that which was originally the civilisation of Europe will 
breed, even when it is surprised, better engineers, better 
gunners, better chemists, better colonists and a stricter 
political discipline than the cruder, more barbzfric, thing which 
has attacked it. 
« * « « « 
So very general and historical a thesis may sound fantastic 
and is certainly inapplicable to the daily story of the war. 
What ».<; applicable to the daily story of the war and to the 
immediately practical need of public opinion in this country 
at the present state of affairs is, to keep in mind that largest 
immediate effect of the general truth — the fact that the fate 
of the enemy and of ourselves will never be decided in the 
marshes and forestsof the ea.st, but must be decided somewhere 
between the Adriatic and the North Sea. 
The reader hears of this and that town occupied by the ad- 
vancing enemy in the East. Yesterday Czernovitz, to-day 
Riga ; but it is alway upon the East that he hears of these 
things, and he tends to forget that the apparent immobility 
in the West means the retention of the great mass of the enemy 
forces upon one difficult, rapidly wearing and ultimately 
hopeless defensive. In spite of the fact that he has the great 
majority of his men drawn in westward to stay the British, 
l-'rench and Italian tide, and of his material an overwhelming 
proportion, he yet sufl'erson the NV est repeated and continuous 
k)cal defeat. The enemy is, everywhere upon the West, a bar 
against which the Allied Powers are acting as a hammer. 
Xone of their blows has as yet proved decisive, but the effect 
of those blows is cumulative, and they are always delivered 
at the time and place decided upon, not by the receiver, but 
by the giver. 
It is now nearly a year and a quarter since the enemy's 
last power of offensive upon the West died away. He will not 
recover it. He stands there awaiting fate, and nothing can 
deliver him from that fate but some political weakness on our 
side, of which, happily, there is as yet no sign. 
We all know by this time what such a political weakness 
would mean. We are all armed in spirit against it. To lose 
the opportunity for final victory, from fatigue or from a mis- 
apprehension of the true situation, would mean that the power, 
the desire and the practice to make war as Prussia has chosen 
to make war would remain intact. It would mean uninter- 
rupted armament, peaceful civilisation completely at the 
mercy of any sudden aggression, and the acceptation of those 
novel methods by poison, by the bombardment of helpless 
civilian towns from the air, by promiscuous murder at sea, 
which menace alljhuman security — and in particular the founda- 
tions of this country. \\ ith Prussia defeated those precedents 
will not be established. With Prussia u;idefeated and 
negotiating for peace, those precedents become the law of 
future war. They would be mortal in particular to England. 
OCCUPATION OF RIGA 
Tn discussing any military problem Tipon the Eastern front 
at the present moment we are working without one, and that 
the most essential, of military factors. We do not know the 
value in cohesion of the Russian armies. We know that that 
value has lowered, but we do not know in what degree it has 
lowered. An army is properly defined as a body of men or- 
ganised for military action. In that word " organised " 
lies the es'iential character of an army, by which alone its 
mere numerical strength, its munitionment, its uower in 
weapons is informed. Losing organisation altogether ar 
army is no longer an army, though it still has the weapons, 
the munitionment and even the numbers that it had before ; 
a great defeat — or " decision " — means nothing more than 
the destruction of organisation. The mob of men who fled 
at sunset from Waterloo, for instance, were numerically not 
much inferior to the strong force which had just before 
attacked, hour after hour during the whole summer afternoon, 
the defensive line of Wellington. They still had muskets, 
cannon, powder, and shot, mounts and sabres — but they were 
no longer an army, because ^heir cohesion had wholly dis- 
appeared. 
In the case of a defensive line this essential factor of cohesion 
or organisation has another aspect, which is that disaster 
does not depend upon a general dissipation of cohesion, but 
will follow even upon a local one. 
Let there be a portion only of the line which is unreliable, 
and the whole line goes. 
It is notorious that in the present condition of the Russian 
forces, sectors of this kind exist. Further, the enemy is 
accurately informed with regard to the comparative discipline 
of the various sectors in front of him, and can choose the 
most demoralised for his point of attack. On the top of 
that, we have the facts that this modern war of trenches de- 
pends, more than ever did warfare before — though it has 
always so depended — upon supplies and organisation behind 
the fighting line, and that the bodies behind the fighting line • 
are, in the case of the Russian armies, in a worse case than 
the front itself. 
to iO 
I say, it is useless to debate strictly military problems, to 
compare the defensive capabilities of various lines, to judge 
the movement of forces upon the East, in such a state of 
affairs. For discussion of this sort, the discussion of such 
problems as arise on the geographical side of military history, 
presupposes an army fully organised. \\ hen the army is not 
fully organised, when it is in process of alternative disinte- 
gration and rally, the problems are insoluble. It is as though 
one were discussing a problem in chess when one of the 
pla^'ers was subject to fits. You cannot say white is in such 
ancl such a position, and has such and such an advantage over 
black, because you cannot tell when or how long, between 
the next move and the end of the game, white will be in the 
possession of his senses. 
We have, however, in spite of this vitally important un- 
known, certain known things to go uijon. Riga, or rather the 
line of the Dwina, lies apparently \ipon the map as the main 
defence covering of the modern capital, Petrograd ; but 
the reader will remark l^etween the (rulf of Riga and the 
Dwina line, with the capital three Inmdred miles behind, the 
long belt of lake (Lake Peipus), completed by the river, 
which is called Narova, towarcls the sea and a marshy belt in- 
land. Tliis is the so-called " Pskov line." It is clear that 
a mere advance by land would here encounter very heavy 
difficulties, if any sort of opposition can be arranged. The 
season is late ; in some six weeks the district of forest 
