October 17, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
tion of his armiis so considerable, that even if they do not 
suffer immediate disaster, they are faced with certain ultimate 
disaster. 
Before leaving this technical side of the effects of the 
battle, I would like to return to what I said in the first part 
of this article ; the mass against which the British attack was 
delivered. It is a point of signal importance. 
There are two strategical theories which are not so much 
opposed one to the other (save in the sense that certain 
minds incline more to one than to the other) as opposed in 
circumstance and opportunity. The first may roughly be 
defined as the theory of attack upon weakness, and the 
second as the theory of attack upon strength. The first is 
the soul of manoeuvre ; the second of shock. The first is 
the triumph of Wattignies and of Blenheim ; the second 
of, say, Ligny. It was also the soul of the attempt wherein 
Napoleon failed two days later at Waterloo. 
Apart from battles of encirclement, all battles employ 
one of these two methods. Either by manoeuvre ore brings 
his weight to bear upon the place where his enemy is weak, 
thereby breaking his line, and this is the obvious system which 
every student of war recognises the value ; or — what seems 
at -first sight paradoxical — his attack is against strength. To 
use Carnot's phrase : You make for the centre of gravity 
of the enemy's mass. It seems, I say, a paradoxical manoeuvre 
to attack on strength instead of on weakness. But the 
circumstances which makes such a paradox reasonable are 
those in which surprise is impossible, in which to waste time 
in manoeuvre would be to waste something vital ; and 
essentially those in which you are fairly confident of success. 
For if in attacking upon strength you succeed, if you break 
your enemy where he is strongest, you break him at once 
and altogether. A manoeuvre against weakness, even if, as 
at Wattignies, it succeeds, often succeeds but partially. At 
Wattignies the enemy retired. The attack upon strength, 
when it succeeds, must necessarily have a complete result. 
Now, the battle of Cambrai, from which we see such 
great results developed in this lafet week, the victory won 
by the British on October 8th, was of the second type ; it 
was an attack upon strength. The enemy's dispositions 
between the North Sea and the Meuse show two sec- 
tors of especially dense concentration ; one in front of 
Gouraud, and one in front of the Third and Second Armies 
upon the sector of Cambrai, and the latter was the densest 
of the twt). As we have seen, the battle front as a whole 
included not less than twenty-four enemy divisions. It 
was the largest, massed strength of the Germans at any 
front on their line, and it was precisely this dense concen- 
tration suffering defeat which produced the great effects we 
have seen. So densely a collected force suffering defeat 
had nothing strong in its neighbourhood to help to make 
good and to rally. But behind all these particular con- 
siderations there is a general truth in regard to the enemy's 
situation which cannot be too constantly repeated, for 
upon a public appreciation of it will depend a proper use of 
▼ictory. 
As the paper goes to press news comes of a fresh blow in 
Flanders, delivered north of Lille with the object of further 
menacing the salient in which that town stands. The day 
brought the Allied line so far forward that Courtrai Junction 
is now certainly out of use, though the important junction 
of Mouseron, through which LiUe has an alternative line 
of supply, is still at a range of at least io,ooo yards, and 
perhaps a little more. The most advanced posts (Belgian, 
it seems), near the Ingelmunster-Courtrai Railway, are now 
25,000 yards — more than fourteen miles — east of, that is beyond, 
the outermost German positions west of Lille. The salient 
holding that town is now, therefore, very pronounced. The 
positions at Gits are also well east of Ostend, and the pocket 
between the new advance and the sea cannot hold. The 
country to the north of the salient is dry — the advance has 
got past the water meadows, and there is no natural obstacle 
here to defend the strip of coast. On the other hand, any 
further advance north-eastward comes up against the thickly 
wooded and highly defensible country which covers Bruges. 
In the largest aspect of the affair, what has broken down 
the enemy is exhaustion. I may fairly boast that during 
all these four years of analysis of military affairs. 
Land & W.\ter has consistently kept to the forefront the 
essential importance of numbers. It is not a picturesque 
side of war, and it is not one which you can illustrate by 
photograph in the newspapers, or over which you can use 
any of the customary rhetorical adjectives, but it is that 
side of war which is moSt perpetually present to the eyes of 
those who actually conduct or organise operations. How 
many divisions has the enemy brought into the field ? What 
has he in his depots,? What are his sources of future recruit- 
ment ? What is his rate of loss ? What is his real strength 
as compared with his paper establishment ? and so forth. 
When you can answer these questions — and you Can never 
answer them perfectly — then you understand the mihtary 
situation. 
Now the enemy's present exhaustion depends upon three 
factors which we ought to reaHse clearly. In the first place, 
he lost very very heavily during his great gamble in the 
spring and early summer. Those who leant towards a high 
estimate were at that time ridiculed because recent experi- 
ences had led men to a gloomy sort of mood ; they did not 
want to hear good news ; they thought it was misleading. 
But those who were indifferent to moods of any kind and were, 
occupied with the dry bones of statistics, knew what the 
enemy losses must inevitablj' have been. The whole series 
of offensives, from March 21st to the last one, which so piti^ 
fully broke down on July 15th, were conducted almost 
recklessly in expense of men ; and, after all. that was what one 
would have expected considering that the whole theory of 
these attacks was to obtain a decision before American numbers 
could appear in the field upon a large scale. It was a wan 
or lose policy with no sufficient reserve behind it, and there- 
fore it was necessarily as expensive as it could be. After this 
the counter-offensive on the Marne salient, and after that 
that counter-offensive on the Amiens salient were enormously 
expensive to the enemy. His attempts to disentangle him- 
self and retire met with repeated and ceaseless blows, con- 
tinuous and increasing. It is not too much to say that at 
the present moment the total enemy casualties since the 
beginning of the year, must, upon the Western front, have 
been something between one million eight hundred thousand 
and two million, and of these considerably more than half — 
considerably more than a millior— are definitive casualties 
which will never return; that is, deatii, grievous sickness, 
capture. There is not the material left for replacing such losses. 
We have the history of certain divisions. We know how 
they have dwindled. Our press still often talks as though 
the German paper establishment of 9,000 infantry to a 
division were maintained. Three regiments of three hat- 
talions each, and each battalion upon an establifhmert of 
1,000 men. The present reality is an utterly different affair. 
Divisions after divisions among the best must be esti- 
mated at frcm 5,000 to 5,500. There are particular cases 
in which the division is startirgly depleted ; cases in which 
the equivalent of not more than a couple of old battalicns 
could be mustered for fighting at the end of the strrggle. 
Remember that the German army is no longer in the pcsiticn 
it was even during the strain of the Scmme. It cannot 
take divisions out and rest them thoroughly, fill thtm at 
leisure, and return them restored. It is ncv in the situation 
in which a division may be out for a week and yet »ay be 
technically called by its commander a fresh division when 
it returns to the line. • It is in a situation in which a division 
on its way to a brief repose is suddenly sent for and thrown ' 
back into the line. Indeed, the great advantage of superior 
numbers in the present phase of the war, the supreme advan- 
tage, is the opportunity which superior numbers aifcrd of 
resting one's men and replacing them by fresh units. The 
army we are attacking is an aritiy sinking frcm increasing 
and intolerable fatigue. 
THE^OCCUPATION OF NISH 
The occupationfof Nish by the Serbians en Saturday last, 
the 12th, is obviously an event of very high impertance, 
both military and political ; but it also has a local straff gical 
significance which we must not miss, for it is an index of 
the enemy power in the east. Such an index has long been 
lacking. We have known approximatelj'^ the number of 
divisions kept by the Central Powers in Rumania and Poland, 
and, also approximately, the forces kept for the holding 
down of Albania, Montenegro, and Serbian occupied 
territory. But we did not know even approximately (i) 
how far these units had fallen below full establishment, 
(2) what was their internal condition apart from numbers, 
e.g., their moral, their health, their composition as to recruit- 
ment (the age of their men, for instance, and the regions 
from which the men were drawn), nor (3) the full character 
of the police task they had to unciertake : whether they were 
a minimum or an ample force for the functions they had to 
fulfil. 
Upon an answer to the latter unknown, especially turned 
the problem of whether the enemy could check the Allied 
action in the Balkans after the disintegration of the Bulgarian 
Army ; and that problem no one^. soldier or politician, in 
the west could pretend to solve. 
On the whole, instructed opinion seemed to lean to the 
possibility of German and Austrian interference and to the 
defence, perhaps prolonged, of the vital railway Belgrade- 
