Land & Water 
August 8, 1918 
LAND&WATER 
5 Chancery Lane, London, W.C.^. Td. Holbormti^ 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 1918 
Contents 
; After Four Years. (Cartoon.) ... 
CvRRENT Events 
The FoiRTH Year of the War ... 
Four Years of Naval War 
With the American Fleet 
The Foitrth Year in the Air 
St. Quentin 
The Finance of the War 
C.ERMANISM IN THE FOURTH YeAR... 
A Frenchman in an English Mess 
The Reader's Di.\Ry 
The Smallest of Our Allies 
The Temple OF Super-Sight 
Household Notes 
Notes on Kit 
P.\GE 
Bv Kaemaekers i 
By H. Belloc 3 
By Arthur Pollen 9 
iVv H. Whi taker 13 
By Boyd Cable 15 
By Major F. 
Brett Young 21 
By Brougham 
Villiers 24 
By G. K. Chesterton 28 
ByJ.C. Squire 31 
By Peter Bell 32 
By G. C. WiUiamson 34 
By A. Lawrence 38 
40 
44 
The Fourth Year 
THE past year has seen violent fluctuations in 
the field, and tremendous political changes. On 
the Western front we have had Cambrai, the 
bloody battles in Flanders, the great German 
advance towards Amiens in the spring when our 
line was pierced, the rush to tfe Marne, and the decisive 
counter-blow which has still not ended ks we write. In Italy, 
an Austrian victory in which hundreds of thousands of 
prisoners and an enormous number of guns were captured, 
followed by thQ set-back on the Piave. In Asia, Jerusalem 
has been captured and the Turks in Mesopotamia reduced 
to apparent impotence. In Eastern Europe the collapse of 
Russia has been completed and has entailed that of Rumania. 
The enemy has made more prisoners than the Allies, taken 
more booty, overrun immeasurably more territory. Yet 
no one knows better than himself how much his gains have 
cost him. He has suffered a steady drain on his man-power, 
which is fixed and exhaustible. He suffers more and more 
from the consequences of his economic isolation. He sees 
his great sweep in Italy doing nothing to allay the discontent 
and suffering in Austria, and followed not merely by a re- 
covery of Italian spirit and strength, but by a rapprochment 
between Italy and the Hapsburg Slavs, which makes the latter 
dangerous to use against the Allies and, when able (as many 
in Russia and in the Balkans now are able) enthusiastic to 
fight for us. And his vast conquests in Russia, though 
enabling him for a time to release a great number of troops, 
are beginning to look like a trap from which he cannot extri- 
cate his foot. The promised corn has not bei^n forthcoming ; 
all the occupied territories are smouldering with hate ; in 
the Ukraine even those who invited his intervention have 
turned against him ; his chief emissaries are being murdered ; 
wandering and growing armies in Russia keep him perpetually 
anxious ; and, standing everywhere for reaction, he dreads 
the infection of revolution. Thus harassed, he sees over- 
spreading the western horizon a cloud which a year ago he 
tliougiit, or professed to think, no bigger than a man's hand. 
America 
When America came in, those who realised the nature of 
the decisive factors in the war knew that if the Allies could 
"hang on" the issue would not be in doubt. She needed 
time to get ready, and competent observers were always 
aware that her active intervention in the field could not 
be felt until the middle of this summer. Meanwhile, the 
Germans pinned their hopes to the weapon, the reckless use 
of which had brouglit America into the war. That weapon 
humanly speaking, has failed. Millions of tons of ship- 
ping have been sunk, and though the great increase in 
our home food production diminished the menace of starva- 
tion, it was stiU necessary that our output of ships should 
overtake our losses if the vast, and growing, need of transport 
for the American troops and their supplies was to be met. 
It will be met. Shortage of labour limits our own production. 
But the total Allied output of shipping is now greater 
than the total losses. American building now approximately 
equals our own, and there is good reason for supposing t'hat 
in the next six months it will double our own. W^ith the 
ships secured we are certain of that ultimate superiority in 
men and materials which, sooner or later, can lead to only one 
end. There are now a million and a half Americans on this 
side of the Atlantic. They are arriving at the rate of 300,000 
a month, 10,000 a day. They are of a uniform quality 
which gives them an advantage over all the other troops in the 
lield. The flower of the European armies has fallen ; the 
American Army is the only one which is not in large measure 
too young or too old to be of the perfect fighting temper 
and physique. America has a population of a hundred millions 
to draw on. Her manufacturing resources, already felt on 
the sea, will, before long, be felt overw'helmingly in the air, 
where the supremacy of the Allies is being increasingly felt 
as it is. The limits of her effort are not within sight. 
The strength of the Central Empires ebbs and must ebb. 
The One Danger 
One thing alone, under Providence, can imperil our ultimate 
and complete victory : that is a loss of faith, of nerve, or of 
determination on our own part. Every winter, when active 
hostilities are suspended, the timid, the mercurial, the weary, 
and the treacherous, those who think nothing worth fighting 
for and those whose horror at the miseries of Europe obscures 
their vision of what a compromise witli Germany would mean, 
raise their voices in an attempt to persuade us that a temporary 
deadlock is a perrnanent stalemate. These sections of opinion 
and temperament exist in all Allied countries. Our enemies 
have always had their eye on them and have continually 
employed words (though they have been chary of deeds) 
meant to tempt and encourage them. . The wilier of Ger- 
many's rulers would have done more. Some of them re- 
gretted the Brest-Litovsk treaty on the ground that so naked 
an exhibition of greed and ruthlessness would interfere with 
the peace offensive. Others last winter would have coupled 
the great grab in the East with "offers" in the West which 
would give our weaklings a chance of saying that we 
had achieved our main aims. When • the shadow of in- 
evitable defeat begins to creep over Gennany we may 
be certain that, while putting up the most desperate military 
resistance, she will lay herself out as she has never yet done 
to divide the Allie^ Powers and the Allied peoples. During 
the Brest negotiations we had a tentative offer (with a time 
limit) to discuss a pea,ce on the basis of "no annexations 
and no indemnities," provided the Western Powers would 
come round the table with Trotsky, Kuhlmann and Hoffmann. 
A refusal was expected and the offer was not seriously meant ; 
but it was thought useful. When things get worse a 
public and detailed offer of terms is not inconceivable, an 
offer " generous " to an extent not yet dreamt of, but secur- 
ing the domination of the Hapsburgs, the skins and 
the power of the Hohenzollerns. What we have to be pre- 
pared against in the future may be illustrated by an example 
which is not so extreme as it looks. Suppose, to avert defeat, 
Prussia offered to return (in so far as return is possible) to 
the status quo ante helium and to make in addition an offer 
of the Trentino to Italy, and of, say, part of Alsace-Lorraine 
to France ? We know what would happen. Lord Lans- 
downe and Mr. Snowden would certainly say " Here we have 
a basis for negotiation," and the hope of Germany would be 
that they would get sufficient recruits from among our 
politicians to ensure a •:?riously crumbling of public opinion, 
a crumbling which would begin by impeding our effort and 
end by stopping it. We do not believe that the danger of 
the peace offensive succeeding is a great one. But the 
worse becomes Germany's plight the more vigorously she 
will carry it on. It is our duty to be prepared against it. 
