8 
Land & Water 
April 4, 19 1 8 
Its trace running at a sharp angle to the main iront which 
faces and threatens Amiens, is an obvious peril to him. It 
is here that the I'rench can concentrate most rapidly, and 
he hiis that concentration right upon the flank of his main 
effort ; so that if tlie I-Vcnch pushed him northward between 
Montdidier and Noyon his lines of supply would be lost, 
his enemy would have got behind him. His main attack 
on the British he had designed tt> ])r(jceed more rapidly 
than it has actually proceeded. While he created the breacli 
which he took for granted he would create in the British 
line, while he thus separated it from the French, he planned 
to be secure upon his tiank by reposing it upon the marshy 
valley of the Oisc. Across that marshy valley all the way 
from La F6re to the neighbourhood of Noyon a passage is 
extremely difficult. The enemy could hold it with a com- 
paratively weak curtain of troops and guns, and, from the 
heights north-east of Noyon especially, he swept the whole 
of it. Had he made his gap while his tlank still extended 
no further than beyond Noyon or its immediate neighbour- 
hood, he would liave been secure. As a fact, that flank 
now exists over ojien country for more than 20 miles from 
Mcsnil to Pont L'Evfeque. He is therefore under an imme- 
diate and unexpected necessity of checking the French 
menace here and of getting plenty of elbow-room, which 
effort may in its turn develop into an attempt to obtain 
here his principal success. 
I-et us, before following what has happened along this 
critical piece of country, pause for a moment to consider _the 
effect upon the enemy of such an unexpected change of plan. 
A battle which does not proceed exactly according to ])lan 
will necessarily, as it develops, produce elements of weak- 
ness to the side which has had the best of it ; and it is when 
those elements of weakness can be taken advantage of by 
the hitherto weaker opponent that the tide is turned. We 
saw that in the case of the Mame, and all history is full of 
it. But very great actions rarely proceed accorchng to plan. 
Now, it is a curious modern tradition of the Prussian service 
to exaggerate this conformity of an action to its original 
design. In their dispatches they are perpetually using 
phrases to indicate that all goes along lines previously pre- 
pared ; in their military studies they delight to present an 
original plan, real or fictitious, which corresponds to the 
actual event, and when the plan is not carried out there is 
always a note of grievance in the account. 
This trait in the Prussian service proceeds mainly, of 
course, from the general character of that service, and 
especially from its rigidity ; but to-day it also and mainly 
proceeds from the crushing successes of 1864, 1866, and 1870. 
We should never forget that the mechanical fighting 
machine produced by the Prussian State has experienced 
only one closely connected set o[ campaigns in just on a 
hundred years. Between June, 1815, and July, 1914, it had 
no experience of war in any fqrm save the campaigns of 
1864, 1866, and 1870, which gave Prussia complete power 
■over Northern Germany and ultimately over Central Europe. 
By an accident which was \-ery useful to the Pnissian State, 
the oldest men who supervised those campaigns could just 
remember as young men the last of the fighting in 1812-5, 
first on Napoleon's side, and then against him ; while the 
youngest men fighting in those campaigns have also lived 
to be present as soldiers in their old age upon the present 
battlefields. But, in spite of this advantage, which gives a 
personal continuity to the Prussian tradition,, the fact that 
only one very brief and enormously successful interval of war 
exercised it during a whole century has had a powerful 
effect. Contemporary fighting, which the Prussians have 
very carefully studied (the American Civil War, the per- 
petual English colonial campaigns, the, Russo-Turkish and 
the Russo-Japanese campaigns, etc.), informed them theo- 
retically, but failed to affect the spirit of their army. For 
at bottom they despised everything Ihat was not them- 
selves. ' 
Now, it so happened that this group of campaigns, 1864-70, 
followed plan exactly, and that in a sort of crescendo each 
new Prussian strategic scheme followed its calculated course 
even more exactly than its predecessor. The consequence 
was that from 1870 onwards the Prussian mind was firmly 
fixed on the idea of a strategic plan which, if it were Prussian, 
would in some necessary way head to a preconceived result 
along precise lines laid down for it ; \ conversely, a disturb- 
ance of plan weighed more heavily upon the Prussian service 
than upon its rivals, jj It would be a bad misun ierstanding 
of this feature to neglect the advantages attachihg to it. 
It permits of extraordinarily detailed study and exceedingly 
accurate machinery, but the disadvantages are such that 
even an unexpected success cannot be properly developed — 
witness Caporetto, the stunning magnitude of which pro- 
duced nothing, after all ; and witness also the Mame. To-day 
we are the spectators of a great debate as to whether a similar 
unexpected development, upsetting the original Prussian 
plan, can be restored to tlie Prussian advantaige, or will be 
decided against it. This development is, as we have seen, 
the great extension f)f the southern front against the French. 
The original Prussian plan was perfectly clear. One might 
almost say that it was not even concealed.- It has been 
twice stated here. Its central object was the creation of 
a rupture between the British and the French armies. A 
breach 1 anywhere from the neighbourhood of Carnbrai south- 
wards would have sufficed. The more it lay to his left 
towards the Oise the better for the enemy. 
We have als(j seen how that plan failed to follow its exactly 
calculated lines. The time-table could not be observed. 
No complete breach was effected in the British line. By 
the time the exceedingly expensive but deep advance of 
the enemy had reached the line of the Avre and the Doms 
Brook on the west and of the villages from Hamel to Mezi^res, 
as its extreme extension that is, upon the evening of Saturday 
last, the 30th of March, an open flank much more than 
20 miles in extent as the crow flies, and more than 25 foUow- 
ing all tli(> sinuosities of the line, was exposed between the 
Oise at Pont L'Evfeque, just south of Noyon. 
Of the fighting upon this essential piece of country nothing 
conclusive can be said at the moment of writing. There is, 
as it were, a race between the I-"rcnch pressure increasingly 
exercised upon it from the south, and the German counter 
pressure exercised by the peqjetual bringing in of fresh units 
from the north. Tiie dispatches of Saturday present a 
picture of a closely contested fluctuating struggle along the 
double front of which ceaseless small fluctuation takes place. 
Pont L'Ev&que and the crossing of the Marne is lost and taken 
again by the French. The httle village of Plessis de Roye, 
just south of Lassigny is lost, retaken, and then half lost 
again, the French line passing, upon Saturday night, through 
the comer of the Park immediately to the south of it. Bier- 
mont and OrviUers, four miles to the west, the French 
recover. They approach Caj>p\- also. The hamlet of 
Montchel, down on the marshy sources of the Doms Brook 
a couple of miles south of Montdidier, the French having 
abandoned it, they retake at the point of the bayonet. The 
height of Mesnil about 100 feet above the valley facing and 
overlooking Montdidier, is still held. There is no appreciable 
result obtained during all tliat day's fierce struggle upon 
the one side or the other. 
Such is the general aspect of the Great Battle of Picardy 
as it stands according to the news received not later than 
Easter Sunday morning, March 3rst. 
Yet, though it is the open southern face, between Mont- 
didier and Noyon, which is the principal concern of the 
enemy and of the Allies in the present extraordinary shape 
of the whole line, with its sharp angle in front of Montdidier, 
the ground has other features which may at any' moment 
assume a new importance of their own. 
Look, for instance, at' the situation of the great main 
railway line uniting Boulogne and Calais to Paris, through 
Amiens, and forming ever since the Battle of the Marne the 
great lateral communication of the Allies in the North. It 
is already imperilled by the German advance. At the 
nearest point of the fluctuating and contested line — that is, 
at Demuin — the enemy's most advanced troops are barely 
ten thousand yards from its metals — that is, only just over 
six miles — and it is clearly enormously to their advantage 
to put it out of use. Once it be cut or so nearly approached 
as to be useless, there is no othet double line for a long way 
bqfk, and the strain upon it would be very heavy, apart 
from the additional mileage entailed. 
Again, the enemy can get more eUxnv-room not onh' by 
forcing the southern front, but bv enlarging the corner 
round Montdidier to the west and tlie north of that town 
beyond the brook of Doms. 
Lastly, tlicre is the obvious ptnnt of Amiens, about which 
a gi^eat deal has been written because it is the most obviously 
appreciable geographical point for the general reader. Amiens 
is not, of course, and cannot be the main objective of the 
enemy. He is clearly making for an immediate decision, as 
his enormous expense of men proves, and no one can seriously 
pretend that the mere occupation of Amiens would give him 
that decision.' But that does not prevent the great town 
from having a very high importance of its own, apart from 
the still greater importance of the railway which runs through 
it, and might equally be menaced at any other point, whether 
a town was 'standing there or not. Amiens is a centre for 
military activity of every kind, and the dislocation of estab- 
lishment there would be exceedingly serious. It has the 
shops and the turn-tables and the sheds of a great railway 
