Land & Water 
June 20,' 19 1 8 
over, there is a line to be held which cannot be held after 
forces have fallen below a certain level. 
In the interval between the autumn of 1917 and the spring 
of 1918, the enemy, and in particular the German Army, 
utilised their new superiority in numbers in all sorts of ways, 
but principally by way of training. They withdrew great 
numbers from the line — which tlie Allies could not do ; they 
rested them ; they exercised them in a new tactic of mobility 
and surprise. Wlien all was ready they launched that great 
offensive in the West which, as they then firmly believed 
and still believe more doubtfully, should end the campaign 
in their favour before next autumn. ' 
Apart from the elements in their favour which I have just 
mentioned they had, in the largest sense, the advantage 
over the west of interior lines. They could change from a 
main attack against Italy to a main attack in Flanders in 
less than half the time and with much less than half the 
strain imjiosed by such a change upon their opponents. 
They had not only this general advantage of interior lines 
upon the whole west, they had a special advantage of interior 
lines between Lorraine and the North Sea. The enemy 
determined not to pursue, for the moment, the Italian adven- 
ture, which could be only indirectly decisive, but to strike 
upon the West, that is against his principal and most formid- 
able foes. He was moved to act rapidly, at great expense, 
and early by two considerations. 
• ;The first (which seemed to him the least important) was 
the gradual growth of the American forces. He knew that 
these would be insignificant throughout the spring. He did 
not believe that during the greater part of the summer they 
would be greater in proportion than the British Expedition- 
ary Force had been to the French before the Marne. He was 
morally certain that they could not redress the balance in 
numbers in the course of 1918. But he did know that if 
his decision was not reached in .1918 the American armies 
would change the whole situation six months later — other 
things, such as the political situation in the belligerent 
countries, being equal. 
The second thing which pressed him was the tremendous 
strain upon his population as a whole, civilian and military 
combined. The civilian strain is to be measured not only 
hf the scale of rationing, severe as that is, nor even by the 
imperfect organisation of Austrian and Hungarian supply, 
which is, perhaps, a worse feature for them, but principally 
by the fact that the burden had been borne so long. Even 
the allied belligerent countries which are more happily 
circumstanced know what the cumulative effect of a long 
strain can be. Habit palhates it, but upon a balance the 
weariness and the disgust count more than the habit. And 
even upon habit you cannot count where a real privation of 
necessities is concerned. That is something we have never 
had and which the Central Empires have had for a long time. 
The enemy strfick therefore in the West ; he struck early ; 
he struck with e»erytliing organised above all for rapidity, 
and he struck once for all. In other words, he budgeted to 
lose up to his full maximum of men, saying to himself that by 
this means there was a chance of victory and by any other 
policy nothing but a certitude of defeat. ' |i 
Now what was that maximum of men and how would 'he 
use it ? I confine myself to the French front alone. The 
enemy could there use nearly three million of men of whom 
more than a million and a half, but less than a million and 
three-quarters were available as infantry for the active part, 
-of the battle. 
It was upon the infantry tliat the great losses would fall. 
It was the numbers of the infantry and their losses which, there- 
fore, would determine everything. If every man hit or caught 
counted as a permanent loss one might safely say that the 
enemy would budget for a casualty list far below half his 
force. To exceed that would be destruction. He could not 
budget for infantry casualty lists of a million in his infantry. 
He might doubtfully budget for 700,000. 
But not every man hit or caught is a permanent loss. The 
only purely permanent losses are the men caught and the men 
who, being hut, are either killed or so mutilated as not to be of 
any service again. The remainder (with the exception of a 
small proportion who are lost by sickness) return sooner or 
later and in various capacities to the ranks. There is here a 
problem on which infinite discussion has arisen, to wit, how 
to estirriate the exact proportion of strength really recoverable. 
You may have hospital returns. on paper as high as 80 per cent, 
of the wounded, while the number you get back to full active 
service of the same sort which they performed before they 
were into hospital may be nearer 50 per cent, than 60 per cent. 
You have men who can go back to very useful work necessary 
to the army — transport, etc. — but not to the firing hne. You 
have a large proportion who come back so irregularly and so 
slowly that it is almost impossible to make an average rate 
of their return. But in rbund figures you can say that of 
the wounded alone, apart from prisoners and dead, 60 per 
cent., or rather more come back in an average of about four 
months, and a large proportion of these, the light cases, come 
back in the first few weeks. 
Seeing that the problem is, therefore, not a static but a 
dynamic one, and that while loss goes on recruitment is also 
going on, we know that the enemy could budget for very 
much more than a casualty list of 700,000 on the French 
front alone during the fighting of 1918. For each particular 
stroke he would have to budget carefully, of course. If he 
wasted all available material without success in the very 
first blows he might find himself defeated before his recruit- 
ment could recover him. 
Thus it was said with justice in these columns that his 
first two great battles between March 21st and April 19th 
were not calculated to cost much more than 600,000 casual- 
ties and probably cost less : Perhaps half a million. But take 
the fighting from beginning to end, take the fighting of the 
whole of this season, and he might stand a casualty hst of far 
more than a million and yet get his decision before he had 
reached the point of exhaustion and of danger. Some have put 
the number at a million and a half. Class 1920 alone 
represents at least' 450,000 men. 
Special Training of Reserves 
Now the enemy had a further calculation in his favour. 
The power which great numerical superiority had bestowed 
on him to give special training to great bodies of troops resting 
out of the fighting, coupled with very diligent staff work, for 
which he must be given full credit, had given him, as he 
believed, and rightly believed, a new tactical instrument. 
'He thought he could break a line, something which (in the 
West) neither he nor the French nor the British nor the 
Italians had yet succeeded in doing. At Caporetto he did 
this for the first time in the West. On March 22nd he did 
it for the first time in France. 
•Having found that he could break a line, in other words, 
having found that the quasi-permanent field defences 
developed by the present war were, even when backed by 
ample material (which the Russians never had), capable of 
rupture, his main plan was simply to shatter piece-meal 
that defensive line in the West and after each breach to take 
the first possible advantage of the gap, pouring men through 
with the utmost mobility, and trying, if he could, to sever 
the hne thoroughly once and for all ; that is, to prevent 
its re-forming far to the rear and to get around the flank of 
one of the two broken sections. 
This expected result he has not gained. But there is 
another way, a slower one of reaching a decision, which is the 
exhaustion of his foes. He is fighting roughly ten to seven. 
With every advance he takes prisoners in great numbers and 
these though slightly wounded or even unwounded are per- 
manent losses to the side from which they come. He menaces 
point after point of importance on the alUed communications. 
He postpones the power of building up again permanent 
field works against him ; he exercises heavy political pressure 
by the ruin of territory occupied ; by the bombardment of 
distant civilian centres as he goes forward. 
That is the German calculation. That is the very simple 
plan underlying the whole of this fighting. Each individual 
blow has its objective, of course— that of March 21st and 
March 22nd to get between the French and the British and 
effect a complete rupture of the hne ; that of April 9th to 
cut off the Ypres salient and reach the sea ; that of May 27th 
to pass round the forest obstacles and compel a general 
retirement upon ?aris ; that of June 9th to supplement the 
blow of May 27th by coming round on the other side of the 
sahent, with Compiegne as its particular obj'ective, and pre- 
sently the turning of the forest belt as its general goal. 
But dominating all is the conception of a rapid attrition 
of the Allied forces in the course »f the present war : An 
attrition gained with immense loss to his own side but, as he 
hopes, mortal to his foe. 
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