July 4, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
end of the first eighteen months he would still be superior, 
though approaching equality. 
He saw before him, therefore, the fighting season of 1918, 
during which he might use his now greatly superior numbers 
for the purpose of achieving what neither party had yet 
approached at achieving in the West — a true, decision. His 
use of superior numbers took the form of special training 
behind the lines in very great masses. We had the first 
fniits of it at Caporetto ; then came St. Oucntin and the 
Lys ; his great success between Soissons and Rheims ; the 
Battle of the Matz ; the battle of the Piave. Very varying 
success has attended these different blows. They all have 
this in common : That in every one of them the enemy 
possessed the initiative, struck and advanced a»d captured 
far more prisoners and guns than he lost, and was, in general, 
the continuous aggressor. He is so still. Against him and 
his chances there are these two combined factors : The 
growth of the American Army and, a co-relative to this, the 
pauses imposed Upon the enemy by each check which he 
receives in proportion to its severity. Because he must win 
quickly and win in this season, he budgets for very high 
losses — and receives them. But these very high losses 
involve — since the price paid does not purchase victory — 
correspondingly long pauses for recruitment, reorganisation, 
and further intensive training, for his new tactic, of his 
recruits. Every such pause is, in proportion to its length, 
a matter of anxiety to him, for the American tide rises 
steadily. But until or if some blow at last succeeds, he 
cannot avoid the necessity of such lulls, and they endure, 
as I have said, in proportion to the counter-blow he has 
received. In other words, the success of the defensive is 
largely to be measured in the length to which the offensive 
must be drawn out. He still has a superiority in numbers, 
though it is not what it was three months ago ; it gets less 
every day; He must see it vnth final success within the 
next three months or expect to see it disappear with the 
winter. 
Subsidiary Factors 
1 have confined myself entirely to this root matter of 
numbers, eliminating other most important things : the 
prestige of victory, the advantage of invasion, the threat to 
great AUied towns and to one capital, and, the most impor- 
tant element of all, the fact that the enemy's advance has 
left the Allies in France very little room to manoeuvre. I 
have omitted the two vital factors of heavy strain on the 
enemy's side through our blockade and on ours through the 
submarine campaign. But so far as the conspectus of 
numbers is concerned, the description I have given is just. 
Put the thing in the very broadest form and it may be 
thus summarised : 
Until the Russian Revolution a regular and mathematical 
calculation (such as was presented in these columns) showed 
the gradual numerical exhaustion of the enemy and the 
necessary growth of preponderance against him. With the 
Russian Revolution the whole situation changed. The 
enemy is once again in a high numerical preponderance 
resembling that of the early days of the war, only to 
be redressed by the necessarily belated American re- 
cruitment, just as the preponderance in the early days 
was only redressed by _ the necessarily belated British 
recruitment. 
There is, in conclusion, to be answered a question very 
often put to me by correspondents, which is this : Why 
should our combined enemies have a greater preponderance 
against us than their united populations would seem to 
warrant ? 
Root Causes 
Great Britain (excluding Ireland), the French Republic, 
and the Italian Kingdom, have a total population not very 
much less than the total population of the Central Empires ; 
with colonial contingents there is approximate equality. 
What is the secret of this numerical preponderance of which 
I speak ?* 
It proceeds from the following causes, which I will 
tabulate : 
(1) Britain is the coal-field of the European Allies, pos- 
sessed of the industrial equipment required for their muni- 
tionment. Therefore, a ver^' large proportion of he^- total 
man-power is reserved for production. 
It may be argued that the same handicap would affect 
the German coal-fields on the other side, and that the advan- 
tage the Central Empires obtained from the enslaved labour 
of the countries overrun should be balanced by the access 
we have to transatlantic production. But the Central 
Empires control a, very great body of labour beyond that 
which is represented by the corresponding factors on our 
side. The transatlantic production is 3,000 mOes'off, and its 
transport is more and more absorbed by the recruitment of 
the American forces. 
(2) The British maritime effort in supply, blockade, and 
counter-blockade, including building, transport, and all the 
rest of it, takes up another large proportion of man-power ; 
and the fact that Italy has no coal, and France in 
the uninvaded part very little, ^enormously increases 
this factor. 
(3) The communications of the Western AUies, which 
are exterior lines— and mainly maritime at that — are a 
further great drain upon man-power compared with the 
interior fines, all terrestrial, of the enemy ; there may be 
three times — there may be five times — as much man-power 
required to get material from Britain to the Italian front 
as is required to get it from Silesia, Bohemia, or West- 
phalia. 
(4) The scattered and mostly very distant dependencies 
of the British Crown, with the necessity for garrisoning them, 
and for recruiting and maintaining the garrisons, as also 
their supply, are yet another element of diminution. 
(5) The Oriental Allies of the Central Empires impose 
by their position a considerable drain upon the total forces 
of the West. 
There are many other lesser items in the Mst, but there 
are the five main ones, and their effect is that though the 
combined j^opulations of the three Western European Allies 
is in relation to the combined population of the Central 
Empires nearly equal, the disproportion in armed forces 
upon the Western front between the Adriatic and the North 
Sea is high. This inferiority is already in process of reduc- 
tion by the advent of American forces passed through the 
training camps in Europe ; the process steadily continues, 
and we are watching a race between it and the remaining 
efforts of our enemy, [^ while his superiority shall still 
endure. 
The Pacifist-II 
SPACE compelled me to hold over last week the conclu- 
sion of what 1 was writing upon the so-called "Pacifist" 
state of mind in this country. My object, it may be 
remembered, was to analj'se the suppositions upon which a 
small but, to my mind, important body in this country have 
reached the conclusion that the negotiation of peace with 
the enemy is advisable. It seems to me unwise to neglect 
either the sincerity or the weight of this minority, and impor- 
tant to understand why it is in error. If it were a merely 
treasonable, or even unpatriotic, attitude it could be met 
by rljetoric or silence ; but since it contains, as it certainly 
does, men perfectly patriotic, it behoves us to understand 
why they think negotiation even at this stage to be advisable 
in the interests of their country, and to see where what is 
undoubtedly a most dangerous error lies. 
I said at the beginning of this analysis that the supposi- 
tions underlying such a frame of mind were not logically 
connected, and that it was their combination which produced 
the rgsult. The first seemed to me (I said) to be a conviction 
that complete mihtary victory was unattainable. That is 
undoubtedly something in common to all of those who put 
forward such proposals, and I pointed out that a mood of 
this kind had proved very common in all the long struggles 
of history, especially towards their close, and that the event 
invariably showed it to be wrong. 
A second element, 1 pointed out, was the confused idea 
that fighting in itself, the use of force — for no n^atter how 
noble or even necessary an object — was wrong, and coupled 
with it an exceedingly erroneous judgment that in this war 
all belligerents had much tlic same motives, and were all 
equally aggressors. 
The third element, whicli I said I would examine this 
week, is the conception that some stable arrangement could 
be come to fevcn if the war were to cease at its present stage, 
and even with the enemy enjoying his present power. That, 
I think, is never said in so many words, and probably woulcl 
• We must place no reUance in the talk of falsified Geiman census- 
returns. 
