April I 8, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
LAND & WATER 
5 CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, W.C.2 
Telephoac : H0L60RN 2828. 
THURSDAY, APRIL i8, 1918. 
Contents 
PAGE 
Brigadier-General Sandeman Carey, C.B. (Photograph) i 
The Flanders Battlefields. (Illustrations.) By Paul Nash 2 
The Outlook 3 
Battle of the Lys. By Hilaire Belloc 4 
Liberty Against Kaiserism. By Raemaekers 10 and 11 
Lichnowsky's Revelations. By Sir Mortimer Durand 12 
The Irish Convention. By Harold Cox 13 
Fay and the Bombs. By French Strother 15 
From a German Note Book 16 
Shakespeare's Sonnets. By J. C. Squire 17 
Official Art. (Illustrated.) By Charies Marriott 18 
Electrification of Seeds. By Charles Mercier 19 
The Attorney-General's Pilgrimage. (Revniew) 20 
Domestic Economy 22 
Notes on Kit ■ / 25 
The Outlook 
IN the extreme gravity of the present moment the 
prime duty of all is to keep their sense of proportion. 
Panic is the worst of counsellors. Next worst is dis- 
tortion. The magnitude of the war has been such 
from its very origins that this task has been exceed- 
ingly hard to fulfil. There has been something of the contrast 
here which one gets in private life when there is Death in the 
house. The little affairs of every day go on side by side with 
the tremendous event which overshadows us. What is more, 
we do not get out of the rut of the past. We do not forget 
or see the pettiness of our ordinary anxieties imtil long 
after the blow has fallen. 
So it is with these terrible four years and their present 
climax. We are all inevitably driven to see things out of 
perspective ; to remember political quarrels which are now 
meaningless ; still to discuss personalities and policies of 
finance or domestic administration, when all that should 
really concern us is that overhanging issue, the maintenance 
or the fall of England. No one escapes from tliis unfor- 
tunate and inevitable lack of proportion, but every man ran 
escape from it in that degree at least to which he makes his 
effort to see things as they are. It is possible to state things 
as they are. It hais been done over and over again here and 
elsewhere. It may be made yet clearer with each repetition, 
and there is still ample need for the reiteration of the truth. 
« * * 
Prussia, strong in a vast alliance of various dependencies, 
forced on what she thought would be a short and triumphant 
war. These dependencies were (for the purposes of war) 
almost subjects. The Prussian and Austro-Hungarian armies 
had. one word of command and one system of drill and organi- 
sation, from Lemberg and from Konigsberg to the North Sea, 
the Vosges, and the Alps. They had a population of 121 
millions to recruit from. They had no active internal diffi- 
culties within their boundaries. It is quite futile to discuss 
the Prussian motive ; it is enough to affirm it. That motive 
was a mixture of wounded vanity, exaggerated (almost 
insane) pride, including a mystical beUef in a "mission" of 
vileness ; contempt for things outside the orbit of Prussia ; 
and all this mixed with two apparently (but not really con- 
tradictory) things ; curiously detailed and treasonable study 
of special conditions in countries other than those which 
Prussia dominated ; and an ignorance of their soul. Prussia, 
thus prepared and inflamed, desired the war, Prussia made 
the war, and her closest friends abroad (and here) have, 
under the recent effects of domestic revelations and her last 
military policy, themselves abandoned the ridiculous false- 
hood of some "misunderstanding." There is a clean conflict 
between a mere ruining foice in Europe and the civihsation 
"Ivhich it is attempting to destroy. Prussia wanted the war ; 
Prussia launched the war. If Prussia loses, Europe lives. 
If Prussia wins, Europe breaks down. 
* * « 
The ability Prussia has thus discovered after a long siege 
to press the issue to an immediate conclusion is entirely due 
to the collapse of the Eastern front. Nothing that we could 
have done in the West would have saved the situation. That 
situation was produced entirely by the internal condition of 
the Russian Empire. That State — largely artificial — existed 
through and by an autocratic central machine. The religious 
foundation of that autocracy had long declined ; it had 
recently been actively challenged ; it was in rapid decay. 
It had governed and united artificially a vast population, 
exceedingly backward according to the standards of modem 
material civihsation, and particularly backward in the 
industrial development of to-day. 
Being thus backward, the common enemy pushed this, 
our insufficient ally, back by hundreds of miles when once 
the original stock of supply was exhausted. The populations 
under the Tsar suffered frightful losses, and thereby was 
provoked an aeritation against the only possible form of 
government which could hold together what had hitherto 
been called the Russian Empire. When that agitation 
passed a certain point the autocracy and its central govern- 
ment collapsed. Nothing could take its place. 
' * * * 
It is foolish to regard the sly, cowardly, and corrupt inter- 
national elements that then came to the front as mere paid 
agents of the Germans, though the Germans indirectly sub- 
sidised many of them. They thought peace with the enemy 
an obvious good because the love of country which alone can 
make the abominable suffering of war tolerable was ridiculous to 
them. They had no country. The mere fact that they tempted 
men with a rehef from the terrible strain drew to them at 
once the mass of the broken-up soldiery and the worn-out 
countrysides. The enemy from that moment had nothing 
more to fear upon the East. The siege under which he had 
lived for three years was raised. He could concentrate 
entirely upon the West. The result was that from last 
summer onwards the initiative passed into his hands. 
He struck first, last autumn, in Italy, overrunning a 
whole province; capturing a quarter of a million men and 
half the artillery of his Itahan opponent ; he was only just 
prevented from driving that opponent wholly out of the 
field. The weight of his attack having proved so rapidly 
and easily successful, his losses were not yet serious, and he 
was free to design at leisure the risk of a next blow against 
his chief antagonists, the French and the Enghsh, between 
the Alps and the North Sea. But when we say that such a 
policy was a policy of risk, we are saying a thing not less 
obvious than his power to undertake it upon his own initia- 
tive. His domestic conditions were (from lack of food, and 
especially of lubricants and fats) getting desperate. The 
United States would, in time, provide overwhelming masses 
of men and material against him. His great Western attack, 
therefore, unless it were immediately successful, might be so 
expensive as to leave him at the end of it exhausted before 
he could reap its fruits. 
* * * 
He took the risk in the fiJlest sense He engaged 
all he could p>ossibly engage. Opening his attack upon 
March 21st, he has continued it to the present day. He has 
paid a price in total casualties which amount already to 
nearly one-third of his available margin for offence ; and the 
corresponding losses he has inflicted upon an equal opponent 
who (if Pru.ssia fails) wiU soon be a greatly superior opponent, 
are much less than his own. It is none the less worth his 
while to press the adventure on. For if he loses, he does 
but die earlier, having to die anyhow ; whereas if he wins 
before he reaches his maximum possible expenditure in men 
— perhaps double what he has already invested — he will 
have saved himself and have destroyed us. 
In this tremendous moment he is occupied in pursuing 
such a gamble of hfe and death. Nor must we misjudge the 
situation either through overstrain during its sharpest 
moments or through reaction during the checks he receives. 
Whatever happens during the process of the great battle 
—it is all one battle on whatever sector he may choose 
successively to fling himself — the ultimate issue is the only 
thing that counts. Either he will fail before breaking us 
— in which case he has failed for good, and we shall reap the 
full fruits of the failure rapidly enough — or he will succeed 
in breaking us before his last margin of men is spent. He has 
himself forbidden himself all opportunity for a third course. 
I/he exhausts his remaining margin without reaching a decision, 
he is at our mercy. 
In the presence of this obvious truth, there is only one 
problem, and it is a problem of hfe and death. It is 
how to increase the military strength of the nation 
by the means — principally indirect — which are alone 
now open to us between this moment and the end of the 
summer. For in those few weeks (and they will pass with 
terrible rapidity) the fate of this country will be decided. 
