LAND & WATER 
A Political Survey 
By Hilaire Belloc 
Jamiaiy 3, kjiS 
IN' the absence (at tlic moment of writing) of any im- 
portant militar\- movement, let us consider in ^ genc.al 
'urvev tlie political situation : the political conditions 
under which the belligerent world enters the new year 
The year ic)iS will probably be known m history as^ the 
date which determined a certain great rearrangement ,- 
European forces. It is probable that future historian, will 
not only use the phrase '■ since the threat luiropean \\a., 
but also the phrase " as from 1918 " when they are describing 
the re-scttleinent of our ciyilisation. It will be a phrase 
corresponding to another phrase which will certainly be used. 
to wit, "before 1014" , n i, t fi,.,* 
What that settlement will be no mortal can tell ; but tuat 
it will be broadh- one of two kinds is certain. 
It will either be the consequence of our defeat or ot our 
victory ; and according to the one or the other, one or otiier 
of two completely different Kuropean schemes will emerge. 
The former contingency is called by various names : A 
statement of war aims by the .Allies " : " The ending ol 
what is now a useless struggle " : " Peace without annexation 
or indemnities." The clearest of those phases, the most 
direct and uncompromising, was used by Lord Tansdowne 
when he said that we--that is Europe and her ancient ciyihsa- 
tion— now caniiol reach certain aims which were our objects 
at the inception of the war. Each and all of these phrases 
are synonymous w ith an acceptation of defeat liy the \\'estern 
Allies : a surrender by them of the objects which they set out 
to defend when Germany cliallengcd civilisation three and a 
half years ago : an admission by them that the treason to the 
Alliance in the East has renclered it incapable of success, 
and a consiqiicnt recoonition as a permanent element among 
us of a imv and mightv Slalx^a Central Europe organised 
under Prussia and inheriting Prussian methods and tradition. 
This immensely strong novel'thing, the outgrowth of what the 
expansion of "Prussia had already shown throughout fifty 
years, will be the master factor— the determinant— in the 
iuture of Europe. 
The alternative, which would follow upon what we call 
most briefly " victory" or, at greater length, "the putting 
out of action of the Prussian military machine," will see no 
such great Central European State estabhshed at all, but the 
exact contrary of it. It will see the belt of peoples who afhrm 
their German" race and feeling (a belt not more than about 500 
miles at its longest from north to south, from the Baltic to 
the Alpine passes, not more than 450 miles at its widest 
from east to west) labouring under the sense of defeat, con- 
scious that they challenged Europe and that Europe proved 
their master ; organised under one or many Governments 
as may best suit them : disarmed ; the authors of their 
aggression punished, and the mass of them reluctantly devot- 
ing a considerable part of their energies to the economic 
reparation of the evil they have done. 
The Europe emerging from such a victory would make cer- 
tain of free access to the Baltic and to the Black Sea. and would 
be composed not only of the large independent nations, Eng- 
land, France, Italy, Poland, the (ierman States, the Magyar 
State, etc., but also of many smaller nations defined as nearly 
as possible by their national consciousness. There would 
be a Roumania much larger than the Roumania of 1914 ; a 
Soutliern Slav State somewhat larger ; a Czech-Moravian 
State of Bohemia ; and probably small, independent bodies 
to the north and east of Poland, of which Finland would 
certainly be one. 
It is utterly impossible, and has been from the beginning 
of hostilities, to say whether the Allies can accomphsh their 
purpose or not ; whether the mastery of what is called " Middle 
Jiurope," that is, of the Prussian system, will establish itself 
or no. Those politicians who have boldly prophesied without 
ceasing on both sides that their system was certain of victory. 
have madcr themselves upon either side quite equally con- 
temptible. The event only can determine. God is the arbiter 
of victory. 
But whik' this is so, it behoves us-to understand the materials 
out of which alone these two ])ossible futures can be con- 
stnicted. It is a point upon which we are heavily handicapped, 
and upon which the enem\' — by which I mean the Germans 
organised under Prussia — have the great ad\-antage of c.om- 
prchension based both upon their central position and upon a 
special attention to the matter in their contemporary literature 
and academic study. 
The Western nations, as a whole, stood indifferent to or 
ignorant of the East of Europe before this war ; they were 
largely ignorant of their great ("entral rival and of the vast 
new State which it was designing. They were further sin- 
gularly unfamiliar each with the problems of his neighbour. 
How many educated Englishmen or F'renclunen before this 
war could have shown vou upon the map, even roughly, the 
limits of the Polish nation ? How many men could have told 
you even in the briefest fashion, either the history or the present 
distribution of Slav and Italian culture upon the Adriatic ? 
How many educated Frenchmen or Italians had even a broad 
general view of the relations between (Ireat Britain and her 
Dependencies ? How many Englishmen could have drawn 
for you the line of demarcation between Teutonic and Latin 
speech in the Netherlands ; the nature of the cleavage 
created by this ; the fundamental ri'ligious problem also 
attaching to it ? I-3ven now, after three and a half years of 
so terrible a tutoring, one reads continually in the F'rench 
and Itahan papers articles which show that "the writers ha\e 
no conception of what is a national freedom for the English, 
the relation between tonnage and military action overseas. 
One sees continually articles in Flnglish papers, which show 
a corresponding ignorance of German influences in Scandinavia, 
of the Magyar attitude towards the alien rule of Hungar\-, 
and even the elementary question of Alsace Lorraine — 
though this last has been" right in the forefront for a genera- 
tion, and though there depends upon it the whole future of the 
enemy. 
If only we could see Europe as it is ; if only the picture of 
Europe as a whole had been put before young people in the 
schools and Universities, witii what a different spirit should 
we now be entering our discussion with an enemy who 
docs thoroughly understand his Europe, not in its psychology, 
indeed, but iuits external relations and its geographiced and 
racial facts ! , ' 
East and West 
The first great fact which we must grasp is the contrast 
between the East and the West. The ancient civilisations 
of the \\'est had arrived by a long historical process at a 
political state of mind highly differentiated and national. 
The conception of human life in these societies was one deter- 
mined everywhere by nationality. So true was this that even 
where the process ot unification was quite modern, as in Italy, 
or largely artificial, as in Belgium, this "worship of nationality ' 
was so strong that it bore everything before it. A. man's 
first duty was to this idea of the nation. It was hardly 
questioned save by a very small minority of very unpopular 
men. It was acted upon — and this war has been the most 
tremendous proof of it — as even religious emotion has hardly 
caused men to act in the past. There had come to be some- 
thing sacred about frontiers as there had been in antiquity 
something sacred about the w^alls of a city. 
The effect of this great force was felt in a thousand ways. 
It weakened the cosmopolitan claims of religion ; it strangely 
alienated e\-en neighbouring peoples one from the other ; 
it certainly overcame forces that should apparently ha\'e been 
stronger than itself. For instance, it completely mastered 
that tremendous quarrel between the possessors and the dis- 
possessed, which makes our time (at any rate in the industrial 
parts of Europe) so different from anything in the past : 
For ne\-er in the past of Europe has there been, as there is 
to-day. a violent contrast between the few possessors and the 
mass dispossessed, but free proletarians. It was clearly seen. 
I say, that even this issue paled before the extreme claims of 
modern patriotism. The man who had nothing to lose and 
nothing to gain ; whose individual and whose class interests 
were both in ^'iolent conflict with tlie governing minority 
of his fellow citzens. joined at once with that go\'erning mmority 
in defence of the State. 
One might digress here to give a very interesting proof 
of this ; a proof which, I think, must have been specially 
noted in this country. Those who were most sincereU' 
opposed to the religion of patriotism, those who most earnestly 
pleaded for cosmopolitan ideals ; those to whom suffering 
for the sake of a nation or imposing sufiering upon a foreign 
enemy seemed a sort of nightmare, \vere almost always- - 
though quite unconsciously — intensely national types ; yon 
could not match the long-worded Internationahst of Paris 
anywhere in England ; you could not match the English . 
Conscientious Objector anywhere in France. 
We notice, then, in the West this intense national feeling, 
coupled with, and expressed by, clearly hmited frontiers and 
homogeneous societies. 
Now the East of Europe presented a totally different picture 
in this regard. There was here, it is true, "quite as much as 
in the West, strong community feeling, but it w as a community 
