March 7, 191 8 
Land Sc Water 
The German Offer: By Hilaire Belloc 
IN the course of last week the Germtin Chancellor of 
the moment, Hertling, delivered yet another of the 
series of speeches upon peace terms with which Europe 
has now grown familiar. It was replied to by Sir. 
Balfour in the' House of Commons on Wednesday 
last, February 27th. Mr. Balfour made the best that could 
be made out of such very thin material, but the truth is 
that the enemy's declarations (for they cannot be called 
terms) hardly afford matter for debate. The situation is so 
clear, has been of such long standing, and is now so generally 
perceived even by the mass of the public, that these official 
statements and counter .statements are little more than a 
waste of time and are attracting less and less attention. 
The central fact of that situation is the anxiety of Prussia, 
the master of the Central Group which we are fighting, to 
cry oiT while her army is still intact — to be left unhampered 
in her training of subject Slavs of her service. It is as simple 
as that. . 
In pursuing this end, Prussia relics upon forces in our 
Western civilisation vastly stronger than those of the 
numerically and intellectually insignificant Pacifists. She 
relies chiefly upon something common to all human nature, 
which is the tendency to act "unreasonably under a strain. 
She also relies upon the contrast between her own knowledge 
of Slav problems (which is naturally extensive and accurate) 
and the general ignor;mce of them in the West. She further 
relies upon the necessarily diverse character of the several 
nations arrayed against her dominion. All these things are 
in her favour. But a statement of plain fact is not in her 
favour. The facts now known to every one — though they 
have taken a long time getting known — are utterly against 
her moral claim — which is now that the war is but a sad 
misunderstanding. Those facts are also, happily, a.gainst 
the probability of her final victory. In other words, if 
Europe calls in its intelligence to correct its moods, Europe 
will win and barbarism will be defeated. 
The position has, therefore, two clear elements : — 
(i) Prussia and her dependents have gained a great and 
decisive victory against the alliance on its isolated Eastern 
front ; which victory, if it can be left undisturbed, will double 
her power in a generation. 
But (2); he and they are perilously exhausted — far more, 
exhausted than is the West ; and Prussia sees little chance 
of any further accident which tvould relieve the growing 
pressure against her. She perceives that if the war is main- 
tained in spite of the heavy strain on us, the strain on her 
will break her. 
First, the Centra! Empires under the leadership of Prussia 
have won a complete and decisive victory upon the front 
between the Baltic and the Black Sea ; added to which 
victory, and as a consequence of it, they obtained a recent 
military success in Italy upon a scale so stupendous (the 
greatest single capture in men and guns of all military 
history) that though no decision was then obtained, the 
moral effect was overwhelming in the enemy's countries and 
very serious in our own. 
To such an atmosphere of success — which in the case of 
the Slav countries is much more than an atmosphere — 
Prussia and her subjects stand now with a record of three 
and a half years' successful resistance between the Alps and 
the North Sea. This successful resistance has involved 
— by a mere mechanical accident, it is true, but none the 
less has involved — the great moral factor of fighting upon 
enemy soil. Until the air raids began to develop, the war 
was, for the German at home, a terrible trial compensated 
for by the triumph of ordering and subjugating portions of 
the civilised West. This was more than a moral asset ; it 
was a material asset as well. If the Western siege line had 
crystallised in the fluctuations of 1914 upon German instead 
of upon French and Bel.gian soil, the enemy would have 
been handicapped by having to spare as much as possible 
what lay behind our lines, while we would have had the 
pleasure of destroying without any great compunction all 
that lay behind his. If St. Quentin were Cologne, for 
instance, or Douai Bonn, they would be uninhabited to-day. 
This first element, then, is the fact that Pru.ssia and her 
dependents are the heirs of a gratifying and very great 
success, the last and most striking proofs of which arc imme- 
diate and vivid The Italian victory is only live months 
old ; the occupation of Reval is not a fortnight old. And it 
simply lies with the enemy when he may cjioose to occupy 
St. Petersburg in the North and Kieff in the south. 
But the second counterbalancing element, of which far too 
little is made, is more serious in the eyes of soldiers and 
in the eyes of statesmen. It is the degree of exhaustion 
from which the German Empire and Austria-Hungar\- are 
suffering. 
Of the belligerent nations upon the European sidf, the 
side of civilisation, the only one to enter the war fully 
mobilised was the French Republic. We know what four 
years of war have done to the effectives and to the civilian 
man-power of that nation. Well, that same four years have 
done more, not very much more, but more, to the civilian 
man-power, and still more to the effectives, of the. two 
Central Empires. These also entered the war from the 
first moment fully mobilised. In other words, they have 
been standing a maximum of losses from the beginning. 
Great Britain, with her Colonies and Dependencies, 
developed her resources with marvellous rapidity, but still 
the pace was limited by sheer physical necessity, and the 
average numbers in the field were correspondingly smaller 
than those of any nation entering the war fully mobilised on 
its first outbreak. We have been publicly told, upon 
official authority, that our casualties of all kinds are, so far. 
perhaps one-third of the French, and that the casualties of 
all kinds from these islands alone are perhaps equal to the 
French dead alone. On that basis we can contrast the 
German position, in particular among our enemies, with the 
English position in p;u-ticular among the Allies. 
Actual German Losses 
The Germans have now buried (killed, prematurely dead 
from disease, and from wounds) something like three million 
of those drawing military rations ; perhaps somewhat more. 
They have lost much more than three million males dead, 
over and above the average rate in peace time. And there 
are other factors in the position which are sometimes for- 
gotten. The German military system depended upon a 
caste of officers. That caste has been half destroyed by the 
war, and the gaps have been supplemented in various ways : 
by temporary commissions onlv granted after expressed 
limitations of rank and authority ; by giving non-com- 
missioned officers commissioned duties : by reducing the 
proportion of command ta rank and' file, etc. . With all 
these supplementary' methods rather grudgingly used, the 
handicap from which Germany suffers in a long war remains. 
The jealous regard of the miJitarv caste for its position, has 
prevented in Germany what France has done naturally for 
a century, and what England has successfully, though 
experimentally, done in the last three years^ — the creation 
of a body of officers chosen and promoted almost without 
regard to social rank in peace. 
At the same time, the enemy is suffering from a more 
severe economic exhaustion than the Western Allies, and he 
has been suffering from it for a much longer time. There 
are in this province anomalies and discrepancies. Civilian 
rationing, for instance, has come upon Great Britain 
suddenly and severely, thoiigh only on a few articles, whereas 
in the' Central Empires it has been at work almost from the 
beginning — though covering man\- more articles. Certain 
necessaries are perilously near the murgin with us which in 
the enemy's country are more abundant. But. striking a 
balance, that balance is heavily against him and in out 
favour. Our real difficulty is transport — principalK' mari- 
time, and therefore vulnerable and slow, while the distances 
to be travelled are also very long. His transport is short, 
invulnerable, and rapid. But the ultimate fact is available 
supply, and in this the enemy is far worse hit than his 
opponents. He can use, not without great friction, the 
civilian power of Belgium and of a small strip of Northern 
France. He can use, on a scale which so far has been but 
an insignificant part of the whole, certain industrial centres 
in Poland ; but against this we have the mass of British 
industrial power, the complement to the fact that the Britisli 
armies were mobilised more slowly and less fully than those 
of the French ; further, we have the production of the world 
behind us, especially of the United States. 
There is one last point to be considered in this economic 
exhaustion of the enemy : a point to which allusion has 
often been made in this journal the complete cutting off 
of tropical and sub-tropical products from the Central 
Empires. We have just had one striking example of its 
effect in the difficulty the enemy has to provide efficient 
gas masks from lack of rubber ; but- it is something running 
