Land & Watef 
March 
2 I. 
1918 
west that his own centres, so far as affecting civilian life is 
concerned, lie much further from our points of departure 
than do ours from Jiis All that is destroyed in the Western 
siege belt is Belgian or French, or what the French count as 
part of their territory, for it is Alsatian or of Lorraine. And 
it so happens that the purely German centres which are 
nearest to Allied points of departure are the less important. 
For instance, if Alsace and Lorraine were really German 
territor)', Metz, Strasburg, Colmar, Mulhouse, ThionviUe, 
would be vulnerable, as no great corresponding Allied centres 
are vulnerable with the exception of Nancy. But imme- 
diately beyond the Rhine in this neighbourhood you have 
only the Black F"orest and the territory of Baden with few 
targets of importance, Freiburg and Karlsruhe being the 
only considerable centres ; while the area where most can 
be done lies far back in the basin of the Lower Rhine, from 
Cologne northwards. 
The enemy, then, has two great targets, each unique in 
character, highly vulnerable, close to hand, and his siege 
lines cover our targets at a much greater distance than they 
cover his. l-'urther, for reasons that will be explained in a 
moment, the finding of one's way to those targets is a some- 
what longer and more difficult business. 
There are two great sets of advantages present to the 
Allies in this deplorable sort of warfare which the enemy 
has brought upon himself. 
The first is topographical, and therefore permanent, and 
consists in the fact that the heart of German war industry 
and of compact industrial population, though distant, is 
within reach, while it is more concentrated than the more 
distant centres of the Allies. It is to be found in that vast 
mass of industrial humanity which is crowded upon a com- 
paratively small area of the Lower Rhine basin, and par- 
ticularly of the Ruhr Valley. 
The second is moral or political, and therefore neither 
necessarily permanent nor susceptible of exact calculation. 
It is twofold, and consists in the superior work of the Allied 
aircraft and in the awakening of the enemy to war upon 
his own soil. 
I will take these in reverse order. 
It is a matter entirely dependent upon individual judg- 
ment, and one upon which one can therefore make no positive 
pronouncement, but one upon which general observation is 
agreed that the immunity of German soil from the actual 
presence of war has had very much to do with the main- 
tenance of enemy moral. Personally, 1 do not believe that 
if the siege lines had fallen within German territory the 
German character would have held as the French has done. 
But those who would differ from me in this will agree that 
for any nation it is an immense moral advantage that the 
destruction and the terror should be falling, so far as civilians 
are concerned, upon enemj' territory. We have only to 
coasider the difference between an invaded and an uninvaded 
England to appreciate the force of that truth. Further, we 
know from the German Press, and far better from reports 
that reach the Allies, how powerful has been the effect of the 
hitherto trifling punishment inflicted upon German centres. 
The first raid upon Karlsruhe produced a violence of emotion 
not comparable to anything that has taken place hitherto in 
London or in Paris. Treves— a most important military 
centre— IS beginning to caU itself uninhabitable ; and if we 
had no other evidence, the tone of the enemy's allusion to 
Mannheim alone would be enough ; though Mannheim and 
stiM more the great group of factories on the opposite side of 
the Rhme, are of the highest military importance quite 
apart from the effect our raids have now produced upon 
their civilian inhabitants. If these Upper Rhine centres 
-4 am for the moment neglecting the great industrial dis- 
trict of the Lower Rhme— were only a few isolated points 
comparable, say, to the residential towns in the Severn 
VaUey, the effect would still be striking enough • but in 
■point of fact, the whole district between Strasburg on 'the 
south and the gorge of the Rhine on the north is densely 
inhabited and of high political importance. The vulnerable 
areas of purely German character lying within the Rhine 
basm. and accessible to aircraft with their present radius of 
action, contain an urban population nearly half that of the 
great cities of the Empire, if we exclude the two capitals of 
Berlm and Munich, and the port ^nd neighbourhood of 
Hamburg. The German Empire has a distribution of popu- 
lation fairly simply arranged in three divisions There is 
the densely inhabited basin of the Upper Elbe • there is the 
larger and more thickly inhabited population of the Rhine • 
^^utl'^ remainder by far the greater part, is not densely 
R^rl-nf Hih '""*^'"l,""ly the great agglomerations of 
Beriin and the ports of Hamburg and Bremen 
There is another political point-vague, uncertain, and 
only given for what it is worth-and that is the historical 
connection of the Rhine district with the modem German 
Empire. That connection was at first somewhat artificial ; 
the character of its inhabitants is the most remote in all 
Germany from the character of the Prussian squirearchy and 
bureaucracy, which owes its modern supremacy entirely to 
the victories of a generation ago ; and a serious dislocation 
of civihan life upon the Rhine would have an effect, not to 
be exaggerated but to be remembered, upon the whole 
structure of modem Germany. The point of Prussia for 
these people is not only that she has made them part of a 
great State, and able to enjoy the sense of past victories, but 
also that she can continue to confirm their security. 
As to the asset manifestly possessed by the Allies at the 
present moment in superiority of the work done in the air, 
we can but note it, and hope and expect it to continue ; but 
we must remember that it is not a permanent and necessary 
asset as is the geographical one. British flights across 
German territory ^ake place by day as well as by night ; 
weather lias had to be less carefully chosen for our attacks 
than for theirs ; and these attacks have a repeated and 
assiduous character hitherto lacking in theirs. The whole 
line of the river down as far as Coblentz and up the Moselle 
as high as Treves has been alive with raids for two months, 
although the season is but opening ; and the intensity of the 
effort is rapidly increasing. 
Cologne 
Now let us turn to the chief objective, the great mass of 
industrial population which stands upon a comparatively 
small area of the Lower Rhine Valley, and particularly 
within the basin of the right-hand tributary called the Ruhr. 
If the reader will look at the map accompanying this 
article, he will see, marked "A," a rather small heart-shaped 
region just north of Cologne, but including that city, and 
lying, for the most part, upon the right bank of the Rhine. 
This region is the region of dense population which is some- 
times generally termed, from the province, in which its major 
part lies, "The Westphalian Coalfield." It is economically 
the foundation-stone of the modern German Empire. Coupled 
with the possession of the great ironfields in Lorraine, 
captured in 1871, which send their ore northwards to this 
coalfield, the Westphalian industrial district is the pivot 
upon which the industrial expansion of modern Germany 
has turned. The River Ruhr, coming down from the 
Southern Westphalian Hills, holds in its basin the great mass 
of coal upon which all this new mechanical power has arisen, 
and the district is a nest of towns comparable to those of 
our Lancashire and Yorkshire district, some actually touching, 
all of them in close neighbourhood one with another. Essen' 
the arsenal of modern Germany, is the best known in this 
country, and the largest single municipality with just on 300,000 
population. But Dortmund, with considerably more than 
200,000, on the east of the coalfiSld, mns it close, and you 
have, all within fifty miles by little more than thirty. Barmen 
and Bochum, Mulheim, Duisburg, etc., with Crefeld cleaner 
and cut off from the rest upon the western limit of the area. 
To the south of this compact and highly vulnerable mass 
stands what is now virtually the capital of it all— that is 
the great historical town to which the whole place looks 
socially, the town of Cologne, with over half a million 
inhabitants— the chief crossing-place of the line, the prin- 
cipal German station on the highway of Northern Europe. 
If you stand in Barmen you have within a radius of a long 
day s walk upon every side— within a radius that is of little 
more than twenty-five miles and a good deal less than thirty 
—an extraordinarily packed industrial centre any consider- 
able disturbance of which would hamstring modern Germany 
AJtIiough we speak of these centres of the Westphalian 
Loalheld and of the Ruhr basin as separate towns, they are 
like our industrial centres in the West Riding and in Lan- 
cashire, often great groups of almost continuous building in 
which the vanous towns merge. Gelsenkirchen and Essen 
are continued on into Mulheim and Oberhausen, and the 
latter into Hambourn almost without a break, whUe Duisburg 
across the Ruhr from Hambourn, is only separated by the 
water-courses and the docks. Crefeld and Dusseldorf stand 
lairly separate, so does Dortmund at the other extremity of 
the group ; but Elberfeld and Barmen are one long town 
and there is not a mUe of clear country between these and 
the hve-miJe stretch of houses which is caUed in various 
parts Gevelsberg, Hospe, and Hagen. 
Another way of grasping the importance of the district is 
to appreciate that the total population of its large incor- 
porated towns, apart from the smaller groups which are 
virtuaUy part of those towns, comes to no less than just 
over three million souls, or, if we include Cologne, more 
than three millions and a half. 
