May 9, 191 8 
Land & Water 
The Victory of April 29th : By H. Belloc 
THE great action of Monday, April 29th, is not 
only of the highest interest in itself as an example 
of the defensive nt^w organised by the Allies, but 
also because it exhibits much more clearly than 
usual the general scheme of the war in its present 
phase, the play of the offensive against the defensive, the 
calculation of each party, and the measure of success which 
each is obtaining towards these contrasted objects. 
So far as this large aspect of the great German offensive, 
as a whole, is concerned, what we have to note is this : — 
The action of April 29th came at the end of a long series 
which in their entirety may be called the second phase of 
the great offensive. 
Whether it is the close of that phase or no, only the future 
can tell us ; whether the enem\''s action will develop a third 
phase many have asked but none can pretend to answer, 
and the attempt to answer it, which has been made in so 
many sections of the Press, is quite futile. The enemy has 
and retains the initiative as well as the offensive, and that 
will remain the position inevitably until a certain point of 
exnaustion is reached, which it is the whole object of the 
defensive to provoke by the infliction of superior losses. 
The enemy may use that initiative of his to spin out the 
process, or he may attempt once more, with the remaining 
fresh troops he has in hand, to snatch a decision in one blow. 
He may have it in mind that the defensive will crumble if he 
continues a succession of strong local attacks, any one of 
which may give him some useful point in ground, such as a 
jx)rt, or some sharp advantage in numbers by a local break- 
down upon the other side with a corresponding capture of 
prisoners. He may, on the other hand, prefer to mass for 
one more great concerted action upon the largest scale still 
open to him — with the use, say, of thirty or forty divisions 
at once, e.g., between Albert and Arras. 
Not only do we not know in the least which of these two 
general ideas will guide the future : he himself does not 
know. The successive accidents of a battle control and 
perpetually modify military policy. There is no such thing 
as a fixed plan governing an action save in the rare cases 
where an action is immediately successful. Upon the con- 
trary, the great bulk of military operations in history hava 
consisted in a series of steps, each moulded by the result 
of the last. 
Even the vague and doubtful indications obtainable from 
the result of actions alone are subject to a supreme political 
modification which again we cannot judge ; the pressure 
exercised upon the German Government by the economic 
strain its civihan population suffers and by the judgment of 
the great money power in such centres as Frankfort and 
'Hamburg. 
The past, however, is open to us ; and, as I have said, we 
there essentially distinguish two phases so far in the great 
German offensive of 1918. 1 
The first phase was the attempt — very nearly successful, 
and though unsuccessful, giving an immense advantage in 
prisoners and material— to separate the French and the British 
armies and to roll up the latter. This phase opened upon 
March 21st, and continued for ten days. At its close the 
enemy found that he had failed to create a permanent gap. 
He was held, but he had taken so many prisoners that the 
definitive* losses on his opponent's side nearly balanced his 
own. He had captured an enormous amount of material ; he 
had compelled a fraction of the Allied reserve to be thrown 
in to save the situation. He had put himself very near vital 
points on the lateral communications of the Allies-^notably 
Amiens. What was almost as important from his point of 
view, he had destroyed and overrun most of the permanent 
defences on the northern part of the Western front, and had 
created a war of movement : slow and partial, but still a 
war of movement. 
Under such circumstances, he inaugurated the second 
phase of his offensive. The mark of this second phase has 
been the use of smaller groups upon narrower fronts ; each 
such attack being designed to perpetuate the war of move- 
ment, to compel furtlier fractions of the detached Allied 
reserve to be thrown in ; and to compel these fresh troops 
to very long journeys round the outside of a great salient by 
comnuinications which were far lengthier than his own. 
• By " definitive losses " we mean losses that are never replaced : The 
d'/ad, mutilated, and prisoners ; as contrasted with gross 01 total losses 
which include sick and wounded of all kinds as well. Ol the latter, a 
J.trge proportion ultimately return to the ranks. 
The greatest and most successful of his operations in this 
second phase, as well as the smallest or least successful, 
have all this mark in common : that they are local instead of 
general ; deliberately dispersed so that the whole hne may 
be shaken by various widely separated blows ; and designed 
each, first, to put a further "drain upon the AlHed reserves in 
men, secondly, to try the chances of considerable local results 
-psuch as {a) the production of confusion and consequent 
superior loss to the defensive, (b) the production of salients, 
e.g., Bethune, Messines, which can be reduced by further 
pressure, (c) the occupation of points of ground valuable for 
further action, e.g., the plateau of Villers-Brettoneux, or 
valuable in themselves as military assets, e.g., the port of 
Dunkirk. 
It is further obvious that if any one of these local blows 
of the second phase prove unexpectedly successful, the 
result can be rapidly used for exercising pressure at once 
against the wounded sector of the Allied defensive line and 
perhaps achieving an unexpectedly great result. 
The Enemy's Policy 
So stated, the enemy's policy, of which he has the full 
initiative, is not only simple but, apparently, wholly and 
necessarily to his advantage. So stated, it is the action of a 
mere conqueror who is methodically proceeding with his 
conquest ; and that is the light in which the German mihtary 
writers are treating this second phase. That is the way in 
which the German Press is expected to regard it, and does 
for the most part usually regard it. We have such phrases 
as : "Victory in the West at short date is now inevitable." 
"The conclusion is now foregone." "The repeated blows 
against the English and their repeated breakdown compel 
the exhausted French to use up the last of their resources." 
"We strike where we will, when we will, and always in the 
successful pursuit of a methodical plan," etc. 
The counter-part, however, to that point of view, the thing 
not said on the German side, and yet the thing which makes all 
the difference, is the expense of men multiplied by the effect 
of time. 
^ Suppose this policy (a) to be drawn out for some months 
without reaching a final issue, and (i) to be costing the enemy 
at least three men where it cost the Allies two (the proportion 
of Verdun), or even, as may well be the case after a series of 
bad failures to advance, two men where it cost the Allies one 
— then it is not a winning game, but a losing game. 
As to the effect of time, the unknown factor is the exploita- 
tion of the East. So long as the Prussian armies are unde- 
feated, the Slavs of the East, now in the enemy's hands 
through the international traitors at the capital of what 
was once the Russian Empire, can be gradually exploited. 
They can ultimately produce food and a great part of the 
raw material needed by the enemy. The whole problem lies 
in the answer to the question : "At what rate ?" 
Meanwhile, the strain on the Central Empires gets more 
and more severe. In the more civiUsed (and less organised) 
southern part, the Upper Danube Valley, it is shocking ; 
patches of comparative plenty in country districts stand 
side by side with actual famine in some towns. In the less 
civiMsed (and still less organised) south-west, the Lower 
Danube Valley, things are worse still. In the Northern 
Baltic Plains, manufacturing Saxony, and the Lower Rhine 
Valley, the great German industrial system, with its crude, 
inferior culture and. its highly exact organisation, the 
strain is far better distributed, and therefore presents fewer 
special points of danger. But the strain is none the less 
very severe indeed. It was undoubtedly this general strain 
ufwn the Central Empires which provoked the experiment 
of last March and the gamble with the remaining men in 
hand. It was because that gamble was played with such 
very high stakes on the board, because such a vast concen- 
tration just failed to reach its goal, that the second phase has 
taken that form of repeated local attacks which we have 
described. 
How distinct the second phase is from the first a few 
comparative statistics will show : — 
In the first great attack, 40 di\isions gave the shock, 
swelhng to 50 within twenty-four hours, reinforced by 20 
more during the pursuit, and reaching a total before the 
end of the operation of over 80. 
None of the actions in the second phase has occupied more 
than 13 divisions, and each such action has been quite 
