February 21, 1 9 1 8 
Land & Water 
sweeping the sources of the Danube and taking 100,000 
prisoners and a thousand guns had unfortunately failed to 
reach Ulm ; if the names of obscure hamlets in the Black 
Forest were substituted for the ruined huts and the clay ghylls 
of the Argonne ; if there were no talk of action in the Narrow 
Seas, but raids, however futile, against the coast towns of 
the Elbe and Weser mouths. 
It is an immense moral asset, this situation of the war upon 
alien soil. No careful observer will deny the difference in 
effect it has even among the Western nations, for all their 
determination, whether their own soil be occupied or no. No 
one can conceive the antics of our pacifists still tolerated 
with Durham and York burnt, and the enemy line stretching 
across England from Morecambe Bay. They \Y0uld be in 
fear of their lives and correspondingly silent if we read daily 
in our papers news of English women enslaved for service in 
German camps, and of English men shot for refusing forced 
labour against their fellows. Yet that is what the French have 
felt for now three years. That is what the Italians feel 
to-day. 
The German master sees then, first of all (however much 
of a pure strategist he may be, however much he may confine 
himself to purely military problems), that in point of fact he 
enjoys by his position on enemy soil an enomjous moral 
advantage. He feels almost physically the pressure he is 
exercising, and above all he appreciates what an asset it is 
with the civilian population for the maintenance of his defence. 
They suffer, but they suffer as conquerors ; and the blockade 
which makes thiem go hungry is a blockade at least maintained 
before lines which are upon the enemy's ground. 
The second element in the judgment such a man forms is 
comparable to this, for it is mainly a moral element, though it 
has its material side as well. It is the fact that the vivid 
tactical points of the war appear to him, and still more to the 
populations whom he rules, as a series of great victories. 
The Allies have enjoyed a success more important than any 
of his because it moulded the whole course of the war, destroyed 
the opportunity of immediate victory for the enemy, was won 
by inferior forces (that is, was the proof of the greater military 
genius), and to this day leaves the opportunity for our victory 
open. That tremendous business was the Battle of the 
Mame. 
But the Battle of the Mame came at the very- beginning of 
what has proved to be four long years of war. The memory 
of it is already old. Its final fruits are still ungathercd. No 
other great tactical success, no other battle to which a name 
can be given and the result set down, no action of movement 
and recoil, can be written on the credit side of our account. 
I am speaking, of course, only of what may be called the 
schoolroom side of war — the names of great actions — but they 
count. Now see what there is upon the other side. 
The German can easily persuade himself that the Mame 
was but a check. Few guns were lost and few prisoners ; a 
line was established and maintained after a comparatively 
short retreat. Attempts to recover the initiative in the West 
failed indeed. But that was negative. Positively the enemy 
can recount such a list as would, if we possessed it, wholly 
change the public mind. At Tannenberg, coincidently with 
the Mame, he enveloped a Russian army, won a victory upon 
the scale of Sedan, captured whole divisions with their artillery, 
and achieved a local decision the like of which we have not yet 
known in the West. 
Three months laterf^tween Lodz and Warsaw, he saved 
himself when he was iti his tum nearly enveloped, and retired 
intact with his prisoners irom the pocket. 
Next he advanced and cleared Eastem Prassia. Three 
corps of the enemy were dissolved ; one wholly obliterated save 
for a remnant which fell back beyond the Niemen. 
With the following spring he broke the Russian line east 
of Cracow, took prisoners in a few days by scores of thousands, 
and reached the San. He compelled his opponent to retire 
from the Carpathians. He re-entered Lemberg ; retook 
Przemysl. He broke the resistance upon the San ; he con- 
verged by the south and by the north against Warsaw. Of 
the two great fortresses on the Vistula he compelled retire- 
ment from the southern'; he stormed the northern one. 
Within little more than a year from his forcing of the war he 
had entered Warsaw. By the autumn he was at Brest. 
Poland had been overran and occupied in its entirety. He 
only just failed to achieve a decision at Vilna. 
Minor Modifications 
It is true that all this was due to the incapacity of a primitive 
and agricultural people to munition itself as modem industry 
can munition great armies for moderp war. It is also tnie 
that the Russian retreat was masterly ; that most of its 
artillery was saved ; that each great salient formed by the 
enemy in the Russian line seven times over was seven times 
successfully emptied, and that right up to the admirable 
defensive movement which saved the salient of Vilna the 
organism of the Russian army remained intact. Under the 
circumstances the Grand Duke Nicholas proved himself a 
master of war ; his conduct of that great retreat will stand 
in our text-books. But it remained with the enemy to say 
that he had a million prisoners and the whole of the Border- 
lands of Russia and of Poland in his hands. 
Jleanwhile two great attempts to break Ms line in the West 
as he had broken the Russian line in the East failed. He was 
shaken ; he lost heavily in men and guns ; but his line was 
not seriously modified. He turned against the Balkans and 
made himself master of everything down to the Greek border 
and beyond. He acquired a new ally in the forces of Bulgaria. 
A second great attempt upon a larger scale than anything 
yet designed imperilled his line upon the Scmme. There was a 
mornent when it all but gave wa j^ — but it did not quite give way. 
Ano.ther army entered against him, the Roumanian ; ^ he 
defeated it, overran more than half its country, occupied its 
capital. 
In the third year of the war three tremendous battles, or 
rather successions of battles, wrested from him the heights 
uf)on which he reposed his Western line. He lost grievously. 
He knew that his future was imperilled by those losses. He 
feared their renewal. None the less his line remained intact. 
The most violent effort, that of the end of July, 1917, was 
held. He made that action (with some excuse) the subject 
for an ovation in his capital. 
Lastly, at the end of such a series, he won the'greatest 
victory of all ; a victory the magnitude of which was unex- 
pected even by himself, the victory of Caporetto. In a few 
days he thrust right into the Italian Plain, counted more' 
than a quarter of a million prisoners, and perhaps half the 
Italian artillery as his trophies. 
Against such a series nothing can be set but the reverse of 
an ally in Volhynia, where the guns lost were few and the 
numerous prisoners largely Slav ; and he can say that it was 
German divisions which saved the situation. 
At the close of all this he has been able to watch with 
contemptuous satisfaction the complete disintegration of one 
half of the Alliance against him and the falling of that society 
which he most feared, I mean the Russian, into the hands 
of a rabble of cosmopolitan anarchists. 
All this does not mean that the chief observer from the 
German side, especially if he be a soldier, reckons with confi- 
dence upon a final victory. Far from it. But it is such a 
series of obvious extemal successes as would mean, if we 
reversed the position and considered our own emotions under 
similar circumstances, the atmosphere or tradition of victory. 
The third element present to his mind is the political success 
upon the East, the fmit of his Eastem campaigns. Men trained 
in diplomacy and having behind them strong and disciplined 
nations have been able to play as they would with absurd 
emissaries sprang from nothing, worthless when they were 
sincere and part not even sincere — his own agents. He has 
been able to arrange new boundaries at will. 
The thing has the more meaning to him because half, or 
more than half, of the history of Germany is the history of a 
German expansion Eastward and of a claim to dominion over 
and colonisation of the Slav. To this career, of Eastward 
conquest by the German there has been but one great obstacle 
and check— the Polish people. That people he finds for the 
moment entirely at his mercy. 
The German leaders looking at the prospect thus see before 
them a diverse alliance in the West and stake all the critical 
remainder of the war up)on its diversity. 
Whether they answer the questions which the situation 
puts to them as cheerfully as the mass of their subjects answer 
them we cannot tell. Probably they do not. Probably they 
regard the future with great anxiety, and certainly they know 
that if the differences between the Western Allies (differences 
of tongue, religion, and superficial interest on which the enemy 
relies) are not allowed to prevail, then the ultimate doom of 
Prassia is certain . But their hopes may well be high, especially 
as they are men who, even the best-trained and the most 
travelled of them, misunderstand foreign psychology. 
It is the whole of our duty to disappoint' that calculation. 
We cannot rival them in rigidity of action, in mechanical 
obedience, or in simplicity of direction, both because we are 
more civilised, more active and altogether of a higher type, 
and also because we are part of an alliance each member of 
which differs most sensibly from his neighbours in character. 
Further, we have none of those past trophies to hearten us 
which he can boast. 
But the duty of unity is so clear, the goal which we have 
to attain so evident, and our power to attain it so evidently 
dependent upon nothing more than tenacity, that if we fail 
the failure- is entirely voluntary, and history will record of 
our downfall that we willed it ourselves. H. Belloc. 
