8 
LAND 6? WATER 
September 19, 1918 
disappointed lli^m, in not making a land victory unneces- 
sary, it seemed at least to have done this : it had made 
military success both possible and certain. 
The first disappointment came when sheer lighting power 
and good generalship brought each of the great hammer 
blows to a standstill before a decision -was reached. The 
second came when, on Independence Day, President Wilson 
autTiorised the publication of his famous correspondence with 
Mr. Baker. From this it appeared that, since the German 
offensive had begun, no less than half a million Americans 
had been landed in France. It was exactly a fortnight 
later that the Germans got a first test of their quality. And 
it was a week after this that von Holtzendorff was dismissed. 
I think we cannot lay too much emphasis on the extreme 
significance of this sequence of events. Observe Foch's 
counter-stroke had not reached its second stage before the 
enemy realised that his whole military plan had miscarried, 
and that he had now. no hope but to play for time. The 
magnitude of the error which had misled him throughout 
the winter and right through the early days of the great 
Kaiser battle was suddenly realised, and the interest of the 
thing lies in this : that it was recognised not to be a military 
but a naval error that had brought his plans to ruin. In 
other words, the events of the last eight weeks are the direct 
result of the incapacity of the German Admiralstab rightly 
to understand the full measure of the submarine's failure. 
After this, the full significance of all our public statements 
in this respect broke in upon them with all their awful import. 
If British sliipping still existed, in such quantities tliat 
400,000 Americans could be bnnight into France in little 
over three months in British bottoms alone, if a steady 
50,000 men a week were coming into that country, if there 
were no e\'idences of famine in Italy, France, or England, 
and a shortage of coal was the only serious privation that 
we had to face, then, quite clearly, the situation had been 
reversed in a most painfully dramatic way. To the German 
public — and, for that 'matter, to the "British and French 
public also — the thing that was jmmediately apparent was 
the change in the aspect of the war on land : not the change 
in the war at sea. But the German Higher Command knew 
better, and five weeks before any official inkling was given 
that Germany's military policy had definitely changed, new 
men had been given the control of the Navy, and the sea 
war was made independent of the land command. 
Now the moral is surely not obscure. From the moment 
that Verdun failed until the windfall of the Russian collapse, 
Germany was under no illusion about land victory. She 
was buoyed for the long period of her military defensive by 
the hope — indeed, the certainty- that her under-water navy 
could do what her armies had failed to do. The disappear- 
ance first of the Tsar and then of his military forces ; and 
the assurance that the submarine had weakened us and kept 
the Americans out, gave her a brief period of military pre- 
dominance ; a brief hope that that i)redominance would be 
pressed to a final success. Now that illusion is gone with 
the rest. 
Peace by Bargain! Why It would mean Ruin: 
By H. M. Hyndman 
COMPROMISE resolutions are almost invariably 
futile ; but a more muddled specimen of this means 
of bringing about sham, unanimity in a sharply 
divided gathering of delegates has never been 
hatched out even at a Trades " Union Congress 
than the resolution, on the war in general, and* peace terms in 
particular, which was passed with only twenty dissentients 
on the last day of the Congress at Derby. So cumbrous, 
ill-worded, and ridiculous was the whole thing that Mr. Will 
Thome, M.P., who spoke nominally in support of it, declared 
in his usual blunt way that he considered the resolution 
"a huge mistake," and the Daily News, which cannot be 
accused of lack of sympathy with half-measures where 
Germany is concerned, says "the compromise arrived at 
served to cloak rather than to increase, or minimise, the 
actual differences of views which exist." Just so. Why, 
then, should a congress, taken to represent by its delegates 
upwards of 4,000,000 of workers, condescend to such con- 
temptible foolishness ? 
Surely what has happened in France ought to have taught 
the pro-Ally section, which undoubtedly voices the opinions 
of the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Great 
Britain, the danger of thus whittling away their own pro- 
gramme in order to foster a pretence of unity which by 
common consent does not exist ! A few months ago the 
pro- Ally members had a good majority in the French Socialist 
Party. They were for "La vidorie integrale" — no peace, 
no negotiations, with the German Government, no meeting 
with German Social-Democrats until the Gerrrjan armies were 
completely beaten in the field and compelled to sue for terms 
for the suspension of hostilities. Things looked very, very 
much worse for France at that time than they do to-day. 
All pro-Ally Socialists had to do was to hold on to their own 
views, and by this time they could have forced their opponents 
to "submit or go out." In fact, they could have done so 
then. 
But the 'unity fetish bemused their intelligence. The 
leaders of the patriotic majority began to compromise, to 
trim, to intrigue, to abstain from voting at an Allied Socialist 
Congress. Albert Thomas, Renaudel, Sembat, and others 
were thus gradually drawn into an untenable position. They 
kept on losing votes because they could not venture to act 
upon their convictions, and at last the minority comfortably 
swallowed the majority. Even so, in all probability the 
split they were so much afraid of will come about. Unless 
the pro-Ally Trade I'nionists in this country organise their 
forces and stick to their guns they, too, will weaken their 
position to a very serious extent. In fact, they have done 
this already. ' 
The 'resolution as a whole is not worth quoting. But the 
concluding clause is directly at variance with the War Aims 
Memorandum of the Labour Party — itself a compromise — 
which in another connection the Congress was committed 
to accent. Here it is : " This Congress urges the Government 
to establish peace negotiations immediately the enemy 
either voluntarily or by compulsion evacuates France and 
Belgium ; and reaffirms its belief in the principle of the 
International as the safest guarantee of the world's peace." 
Writing as a Social-Democrat of nearly forty years' standing, 
as a member of the International Socialist Bureau for the first 
ten years of its existence, and as one who vg,inly warned my 
countrymen that Germany was preparing to attack her 
neighbours for many a long day before the declaration of war, 
I .say that those who voted for those words declared, in effect, 
for surrender to Germany, whether they intended to do so 
or not. Thus they dishonour our great dead and tell our 
American brethren, who are coming over by the million to 
help in the fight, besides stinting themselves of food to feed 
us, that all the grand ideals of which we have talked will be 
abandoned in favour of a patched-up peace and a recon- 
stitution of the" International. A reconstitution of the 
International, with Camille Huysmans, the genial manipu- 
lator of Arthur Henderson in his queer gyrations, as its 
permanent secretary, I suppose. I was actually credulous 
enough to believe that even English Trade Unionists and 
Labourists would remember how the German Social-Demo- 
crats — not only the majority, but the minority as well — had 
taken adv'a^itage of their dominant position in the Inter- 
national Socialist Bureau to gull the Belgians, the French, 
and ourselves, and sell us all to the Kaiser and his Junkers 
at the opening of the war. From first to last, these fraternal 
German Socialists have been as aggressive and as bru^l as 
the rest of their countrymen. Not a single protest have 
they uttered, as a party, against the horrible atrocities and 
piracies which their sailors and soldiers have committed with 
a light heart. 
Yet the Derby Trades Congress "reaffirms its belief 
that" a bureau of the same character, with these Germans 
still in it as degraded tools of the militarist butchers, "is the 
safest guarantee of the world's peace" ! For my part, 
I cannot comprehend how any decent Englishman can again 
sit down at the same table or hold friendly intercourse in 
any way with Scheidemann (now Vice-President of the 
Reichstag), Sudekum, Ebert, David, Haase, Miiller, and 
company. They are the associates, suborners, and patrons 
of pirates, rapers, and murderers in cold blood. I am quite 
sure my old friend Wilhelm Liebnecht would have repudiated 
those miscreants as wholly unworthy of the cause for which 
he and Bebel and others of the old guard went to gaol time 
after time. But our Trade Unionists in Congress assembled 
vote, practically with unanimity, in favour of embracing 
Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's "German friends" before these 
