LAND & WATER 
November 8, 1917 
Gennan retirement over the Ailette and the capture by the 
British of Bccrshe.ba. c j.i „, 
The former e%'ent was the natural consequence of the vc ry 
considerable French success at the end of October. Once 
the spur of Chavignon was in French hands the northern slope 
of the Chemin des Dames was enfiladed and untenable to the 
enemy and they had to give it up. They have gone down mto 
the valley and crossed the stream- . .,, , i- t 
The only accounts of what has happened m Palestme so tar 
to hand are the brief despatches from the British comrnand in 
that region, and a somewhat ampler description commg two 
days later from Mr. Massey. General AUenby's report tells us 
that in the night of Tuesday last, October 30th, a British 
mixed force advanced against Beersheba from the west and 
south-west. The infantry striking at the defences of the town 
from this region, presumably at daybreak, the cavalry moved 
south of it and then round to the east and the town was occu- 
pied in the evening after a determined resistance. General 
AUenby tells us the losses were slight and enumerates his 
captures at 1,800 prisoners and nine guns. The later expanded 
account informs us that the cavalry work sweeping round to 
the south and so round to the east of the town, was accom- 
plished by Australians and New Zealanders, while infantry, 
English in the main, held and then forced the enemy upon 
the west of the place. The former troops reduced the fortified 
knoll of Tele cs Saba (where the two \' alleys meet east of 
Beersheba) by half-past three in the afternoon of Wednesday, 
the 31st, and during the ren'>ai;iing hours of daylight, further 
reduced the German machine-gun post on the northern slopes. 
This done they cut the Hebron Road by which the enemy 
within the town might have retired, and before nightfall they 
occupied the heights immediately north of the road and N.E. 
of Beersheba wliich dominate the whole of that district. The 
town was entered in the early hours of that night and the latest 
reports bring the total of prisoners to more than two and a-haU 
thousand. 
The Conditions of Victory— IV 
DETAILED discussion of the terms of peace while 
the enemy yet feels himself unbeaten is the accepta- 
tion of defeat. It is clearly a relaxation of effort 
under a strain. Such discussion when he has just 
achieved a new and remarkable success is still more obviously 
the acceptation of defeat at his hands. It is parleying. Even 
if we knew nothing of the origin of such a demand, we might 
theoretically determine that it was of enemy origin ; in prac- 
tice we know that it is, both by the moment of its origin and 
bv the nature of its thesis. For the details proposed for dis- 
cussion invariably take for granted the continued strength 
of the enemy ani his continued possession of all that he is 
still able to save. 
An acceptation of the enemy's demand for this detailed 
discussion must be avoided as thoroughly as slackness in 
discipline must be avoided, or as extravagance in conception. 
It would be playing directly, and for most unconsciously, into 
the enemy's hands. 
In contrast ' to such a position is a full appreciation by 
ourselves as to what are the conditions of victory in this awful 
and decisive business which the Germans deliberately pro- 
voked and to which they drove the Austrians in the summer 
of 1914. We need not delay for a moment upon the pre- 
sentation of these conditions of victory to an undefeated 
enemy : For an undefeated enemy could not, for a. moment, 
consider them. It is for ourselves, I repeat, that the study 
is useful : That we may have our minds clear upon what 
is the necessary goal of so much effort, and what it is, 
which if we do not reach, however great the accumulating 
difii(;^lties maj' seem, we are lost. 
There is here no half-way house as there have been in lesser 
wars for lesser and often very limited things. The challenge 
thrown down to Europe, even in the first days of the fight, 
went to the very roots of national existence. The moment 
the German spirit began to develop under arms, the funda- 
mental character of the struggle, always clear to those 
who had watched it coming, became patent by successive ex- 
amples to the most blind. One after the other all those 
conventions and sanctities upon which normal European life 
and the old European civilisation had depended, were violated 
deliberately upon the initiative of those who, in the very first 
hours of their projected conquest, had \iolated the neutrality 
of Belgium. Nothing but a mental fatigue or a base moral 
forgetfulness could make men think otherwise of that long 
descent into chaos which began witli the unprecedented 
ultimatum to Serbia, requiring that country to give up its 
sovereignty, which proceeded, through the refusal of arbitra- 
tion and the crossing into Belgian territory, to the massacres 
and the burning and the shooting of hostages, the looting, 
and at last the murder of civiHan neutrals, and the sinking of 
hospital ships. The series is not ended yet, nor anything like 
ended. It is of its nature interminable, and it has not much 
further to go (if it continues to boast success) for the civilisa- 
tion of Europe to disappear. No mere scheme of disarma- 
ment can wipe out the precedent established if such things 
go unpunished. 
One does iiot compromise or bargain with a thing of that 
sort as one might with a dynastic ambition or with a disputed 
territorial claim. It is clearly life and death on the one 
side and on the other. It is" an issue between an Europe 
rapidly declining in the future, and declining under the 
detestable influence of these new doctrines (whicli cannot 
create but can only destroj^, and an Europe wliich tliougli 
terribly weakened, shall yet Airvive and recover herself. In 
that issue this country is particularly involved because this 
country particularly depends upon those conventions and 
traditions in the relations between civilised communities which 
make possible our crowded life upon an island, and the bonds 
of a sporadic Empire. 
That indeed, is the point which Englishmen must, 
above aU men, grasp ; that their great polity, crowded 
with great cities, wholly dependent upon the sea, will 
be vulnerable as will be no other in a future which should 
permit indiscriminate massacre from the air and from below 
the waters. 
If these new codes of murder are established, no general 
disarmament by land, no disbanding of conscript armies, 
secures this island and its vast inheritance. It is at the 
.mercy of the next threat, or compelled to intensive arma- 
ment for ever. And nothing can ■prevent the establishment 
of that code save the punishment of its promoters. 
As there is no half-way house or compromise to be con- 
sidered where such a challenge of life and death has been 
thrown down (and successfully acted upon) so there is no 
purpose in discussing the chances of success or failure. It 
was a vulgar and despicable trick with many to prophesy 
victory as a certitude. It was a still more vulgar and de- 
testable looseness of the mind which gave way, especially in 
the early days of the war (but again after the overrunning 
of Serbia) toshrieking panic. But neither the one attitude or 
the other is of moment to our subject. The conditions of 
victory remain precisely the same whether victory be achieved 
or no ; wheiher it come to-morrow or after any imaginable 
delay, or do not come at all ; whether it suddenly prove 
easy or in its last stages prove contimiously difficult in 
the extreme, or prove impossible altogether. When a 
man is struggling in a rapid current to reach the bank 
lest he sliould drown, no debate of his chances is of the 
least service. He must put forth his full energy to save him- 
self. No near approach will suffice, tie must land or drown ; 
one of the two. And that truth is as obvious to the man 
who thinks his landing easy as it is to the man who thinks it 
nearly certain he will drovvn. The one fatal piece of advice 
and the only fatal piece one could give to such a man in such a 
strait, would be to advise him to abandon the struggle in the 
vain hope that somewhere- lower down the stream some chance 
might save him. 
So much being said let us appreciate that there are three 
considerations attaching to these conditions of victory. 
The first is that essential act upon which everything 
depends : The breaking of the evil will to which we are 
opposed and which still believes— particularly from its recent 
successes — that it can save itself unbroken : That will can 
only be broken by punishments imposed after success against 
it in the field. You will not break it by asking it to break 
itself. 
The second consideration is that certain material results 
must be apparent as the consequences of victory, lacking 
which the name victory would be perfectly empty, for the 
object of war is peace, and a peace lacking these results would 
be no peace. Those results have been well summarised by the 
head, not of the present, but of the last Government, when 
he put forward the formula : " Restoration, Reparation, and 
Guarantees." These three words between them cover the 
ground. The German proposal to conquer and to impose a 
certain rule upon others must be broken and the material 
result or evidence of that breaking will he the restoration of 
what tliis theorv has cost the others; the restoration of 
that which the "would-be conquerors have -taken by force 
from otliers. without ever consulting even so much as tlie 
population involved, let alone Treaty or ancient law. It 
applies not only to the French provinces from which the 
conqueror provoked a vast eraigration, and which -he later 
colonised to his advantage, but also to the wantonly annexed 
