Land & Water 
April II, I 9 1 8 
Any answer must be vague ; but we may say perhaps 600,000 
men. That is, some double of wliat he had lost in the first 
nine or ten days. He is clearly dctennined to do the thing 
at once or not at all. I-'or reasons which he can gauge better 
than we can, which are mainly political and concerned with 
his condition at home, he is all out to win or lose. With 
his dangerously exposed southern flank he musl do the thing 
(^uicldy or not at all. If he can do it, whatever immense 
losses he has budgeted for will be worth his while. That is 
the situation. 
Should he effect the rupture, he envisages this state of 
affairs : 
Obstacle of the Somme Valley 
Below Amiens runs an obstacle which is among the chief 
in all North-Western Continental Europe, and which has 
played its part again and again in the wars of the last two 
y thousand years. This obstacle is the Lower Valley of the 
Somme, which is a mass of ponds and backwaters far more 
formidable even than the Valley of the Oise. Upon this he 
could count for keeping his flank towards the French while 
he rapidly advanced upon the isolated British forces. 
Holding Abbeville, which he might regard as the con- 
sequehce of the rupture following immediijitely after his 
entry into Amiens, he w(mld have the old Noyon-Oise condi- 
tions reproduced on a vastly larger scale. The Somme 
Valley, a far more formidable obstacle than the Oise, would 
protect his left flank. He would have cut off all the remain- 
ing British forces not only from their French allies, but from 
most of their great ports of supply and innumerable other 
au.xiliary aids. A rhetorician would say that he would have 
tfae Alliance at his mercy. A sober critic would say with 
justice that he had at least achieved his end for the time 
being, whatever future surprises this incalculably great 
campaign of the world might have in store against him. 
For he would have half the Western forces cut off and backed 
against the Channel, nearly all his own free to crush that 
lialf, and the balancing new force, the American Army, not 
\'et in the field in any decisive strength. 
There, then, is the plan, still pursued ; missed in its first 
and easiest form, but continued in its later and more difficult 
form because the prize is so great and the crisis so near that 
the enemy thinks it worth the immensely increased and 
rapidly increasing risk he runs from the shape of his front 
and from his outrageously rapid loss. What we have to 
watch is his real approach — not only in ground, but in ground 
as measured in loss of men ; not only in advance, but in 
advance as threatened by his open flank — towards a separa- 
tion between the French and the British. 
We do not know, and he does not know, how far the situa- 
tion has already called up the Allied reserves. The reason 
we do not know is that no one ought to know this, lest it 
should dribble through to him. But remember, before any 
rash judgment is formed one way or the other, that this 
unknown factor is the kev. 
The three grea^ factors of the battle are the maintenance 
•>i the junction between the British and the French, the 
strength and use of the Allied reserves, and the rate of enemy 
exhaustion. 
The first we have dealt with. It is still intact ; the conse- 
quences of its rupture we have noted, and to produce that 
rupture is the main object of the enemy. The second is 
very properly denied to all students of the situation, and 
must not be touched upon at all. But with regard to the 
third, which is co-equal in importance to the other two, we 
are now beginning to have serious and even detailed informa- 
tion. To that I shall therefore now turn. 
Rate of Enemy Loss 
1 1 we knew exactly the rate of German loss and its extent 
to date we would, subject to the necessary silence upon tlic 
use of Allied reserves, be almost able to give a curve of the 
battle and of its future chances. There is nothing known 
yet, of course, sufficient for this ; but what is already known 
}X)ints to a general conclusion of some moment. That con- 
'lasion is : That the enemy threw in about 61 divisions 
during the first nine days, increased them to 64 on the tenth, 
and to over <So during the violent blow at the French right 
and the junction of the armies just after, and to mnre than 
S6-^riiaps go— by the fifteenth day, Tlmrsdav tiie 4t!i of 
April, when he captured Moreuil and Castel. Of this vast 
force he has of all arms lost perhaps a third. He can continue 
but not double the effort and the consequent loss— and 
all this vast expenditure is proof that the enemy is determined 
upon an extremelyrapid decision.ithat is, upon a gamble against 
time, and our knowledge that he is so risking loss will be 
confirmed by an examination of the figures we are about to 
give. 
The figures are based upon the examination of prisoners 
and, occasionally, upon captured documents. They are 
separate altogether from vague estimates based upon a view 
of particular parts of the field or the number and observed 
effects of attacks behind the enemy's line from the air. They 
deal only with precise information which can be checked. 
We must remember that in a defensive action the first phase 
of which is a rapid, difficult, and very expensive retirement, 
the proportion of enemy prisoners taken is small and the 
information correspondingly insufficient. 
In the fifteen days' fightinf which had elapsed up to the 
morning of Friday, Ajiril 5th, 21 divisions of the enemy 
had furnished details available for publication in the judgment 
of the British Command. The enemy had by that time 
thrown in rather more than 80 divisions, of which a certain 
proportion had come in against the French. We may say. 
then, that we have at the time of writing various items 
of information, items of very different values, upon enemy 
lo.sses in about a third of the enemy's divisions engaged against 
the British. 
Next let us note that the losses ascertained regarded, 
for the most part, not the Whole period of fifteen days, but 
only the first eight or ten. 
This proportion of units dealt with, one-third, is sufficient to 
serve as a sample for the whole, but it is not ample. This reserve 
also must be made : That prisoners and documents captured 
usually come from units which have been specially heavily 
engaged. They do not always come from such units, but 
in most cases they are provided by a body of men which 
has got far forward, fought very hard, has then suffered a 
check, has been beaten back, and has therefore probably 
lost more than the average of the whole lump. I say this is 
generally the case. That there are exceptions and many 
exceptions is exddent : For instance, you may capture 
prisoners from a single enemy company that has got into 
difficulties. Those prisoners may give you information with 
regard to something that happened to their whole division 
many days before, when it was not suffering exceptional 
losses. But as a^rule the information on enemy losses comes 
to the defensive, and especially to the retiring force, from 
enemy units which have suffered somewhat beyond the average. 
It is important to make this proviso. 
The 21 divisions on which we have information are as 
follows : 
( The I2th Division 
I The Guards Erzatz Division 
rThe 119th Division 
JThe 1st Division 
^The 13th Division 
The 45th Division 
The 5th Division 
The 88th Division 
j The 20th Division 
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The 208th Division 
The 6th Division 1^ 
The 125th Division 
The 1st Bavarian Division 
o g ^The 4th Division 
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The 50th Reserve Division 
The 239th Division 
The 26th Division 
5 ^The 41st Division 
The 3rd Division of the Guards 
The i6th Bavarian Division 
The 1st Guards Reserve Division 
They fall into two groups. There are those concerning 
which we have information of the suffering of the division as 
a whole, and those on which we have information, highly 
detailed indeed, but referring only to certain units of the 
division. 
The former of these categories is the largest. It deals 
with 13 out of the 21. The latter deals with only eight. 
In other words, we have divisional information, though often 
it is only of a general kind, upon rather less than two-thirds 
of our subject covering the average losses of the divisions as 
a whole. The more detailed evidence which gives you 
accurate figures for small portions, which confirms doubtful 
points, but upon wliich it is more difficult to build large 
conclusions, deals with more than one-third of the formations 
mentioned. We may therefore say with justice that we get 
our only good view of the general losses from two-thirds of 
the material examined, which is but a fifth or sixth of the whole, 
while certain fragmentary information concerning another 
tenth supports us in our conclusion by detailed examples. 
