December 26, 1918 
LAND 5? WATER 
The Stages of Victory — II: By Hilaire Belloc 
i 
WE ended the first part of this summary last 
week with the situation produced by the 
Battle of the Somme. It is. a convenient 
place upon which to pause. Then first did 
the effects of attrition begin to appear in the 
German forces ; and, as we said last week, then first appeared 
the new tactical instrument, the tank, which was to have' 
so great an effect upon the future of the war. 
It is claimed with justice by those who undertook and 
suffered in that great and prolonged action, that the Battle 
of the Somme laid the foundations of victory. It is the 
more necessary to recognise this because the immediate 
failure to effect a breach in the siege-wall may easily lead the 
historian to underestimate the significance of what was 
done in that momentous summer of 1916. 
The first of these two points upon which I am insisting 
— the appearance of numerical weakness upon the side of the 
enemy — the effect of continued attrition was achieved by 
the sacrifice of the English,; by the very heavy expenditure 
of their new armies. The second feature, the tank, was 
later to prove of even greater importance. For the first time 
a new tactical instrument had appeared, .capable of dealing 
with the chief elements of the modern defensive, and though 
it had not yet appeared in sufficient numbers, nor even in a 
quite adequate form, there it was ; a step had been taken in 
advance of the enemy which he never recovered. Fifteen 
months later we were to see the first example of what that 
new tactical instrument could do at its fullest efficiency ; 
two years later it was to become a deciding factor. 
Though the Battle of the Somme ended in the autumn 
mud of 1916 without apparent strategical result, the exhaus- 
tion of the enemy did produce a remarkable political result. 
He did not yet appreciate what would happen in his favour 
in Russia. He had failed to break through in France, and 
he had been very badly hammered upon the Somme ; he 
withdrew to lines organised with the utmost expense of 
labour and ingenuity, stretching from in front of Arras to 
cover St. Gobain and so to the hill forest of St. Gobain. He 
systematically devastated the country over which he retired ; 
before his retirement he asked in December, 1916, for peace. 
He asked it, naturally enough, as a victor. But, with 
apparent moderation (for the future gave him anxiety), 
he demanded little more than the state of affairs before 
the war. There was no actual demand In terms, only a 
suggestion for negotiation, but that was the atmosphere in 
which the suggestion was made. It was very properly 
refused. In this condition of an apparent deadlock matters 
stood in the late winter of 1916 to 1917. All methods to 
break the modem defensive had failed on either side in 
the West, and the enemy was back upon the strongest and 
best organised of all modem defensive lines. In the East 
the enemy still held Poland and the mass of the Balkans, 
but was confronted with an existing siege-line held by an 
intact and continuous liussian Army. The Italian pressure 
had done no more than render stable the Alpine sector, 
though attack upon attack had there been delivered. A 
very heavy effort and sortie by the Austro-Hungarians in 
May, 1916, down on to the plains from the Trentino had 
failed. A sweeping Russian attempt at a breach back 
toward Lemburg had captured a great number of Austro- 
Hungarian prisoners (principally Slavs), but had not effected 
a breach ; the standstill was complete. 
We arrive at the month of March, 1917, after nearly 
thirty-two months of war with what had all the superficial 
appearance of stalemate. 
But remember that the war was a siege — sieges are of 
their very nature a 'long stalemate in appearance. 
Had there not appeared in tliat spring of 1917 a totally 
new factor, the political breakdown of Russia, tlie collapse 
of the siege would have taken place after no long space of 
time. 
The Russian State was a political agglomeration of which 
Western Europe is very ignorant (and of which the present 
writer knows very little indeed), but wliich may fairly be 
described as an autocracy combining a great number of very 
different political units, dependent necessarily upon the 
military prestige of the force which held it together. That 
prestige, although there had occurred a full defeat in the 
field, although the armies of the Russian Empire and of its 
titular sovereign were still intact, could not survive the 
shock of such enormous losses and of so fearful a retirement. 
There took place what is called "the Russian Revolution," 
though it was not a revolution in any creative sense. No 
new State was made ; notliing was built upon the founda- 
tions of any rational political formula ; mere passion was 
excited ; mere loot and murder were provoked by men most 
of whom (and these were the staff of the movement) desired 
mere revenge for persecution and suffering in the past, and 
most of whom were either indifferent or hostile to the name, 
the glory, and the traditions of the Russian State. 
It was certain, when once the movement of disintegration 
had begun, that Russia soon would be out of the field. 
It was an effect of prodigious consequence in favour of our 
enemies. Had there lain behind and to the east of the 
former Russian siege-wall great sources of supplies, good 
communications, organised industry, and the rest, the Central 
Empires could justly have boasted that the belated fruit of 
their victories in 1915 had raised the great siege. 
Happily, no such source of supply, no such industry, no 
such organisation existed upon the east of our siege-lines. 
The Central Empires were like a force wliich, being besieged 
in some crusading castle, had raised the siege indeed upon 
one side, but that' side towards the desert. The side towards 
supplies and life — the western side — was still blocked. 
AMERICA COMBATANT 
Meanwhile yet another actor had entered upon the stage 
of this tremendous drama. The United States, hitherto 
neutral, and by far the chief source of industrial supply for 
the civilisation of Europe ; the United States, whom we had 
had to consider in the work of the blockade, and the con- 
sideration of whose interests had rendered that blockade 
so imperfect, entered the war as a result of the submarine 
effort undertaken by our opponents. 
At this point it is necessary to consider very briefly what 
that effort had been ; its political meaning and its strategical 
effect. Although I deal only in these notes with the war 
by land, it would be quite impossible to discuss the results 
of that war without putting in its proper place the theory 
of submarine warfare advanced by the Prassians and (more 
reluctantly) by their dependents. 
Prussia, ever since it has been a state of consequence 
—that is, for more than 200 j-ears — has propounded a certain 
theory of warfare essentially stupid, superficially attractive. 
It is a theory that, since warfare aims at the total destruction 
of the enemy forces, all means whatsoever are tolerable. 
J would not say to the human conscience, for the Pmssian 
takes Uttle note of that, but to posterity and to fate, so 
long as they achieve the end of destroying the enemy forces. 
Consonant with this brutish theory, which was apparent 
in the atrocities in France and Belgium, it was advanced 
by the Pmssian General Staff, especially advised by a man 
called Ballin (a millionaire shipowner of Hamburg who has 
since killed himself), that indiscriminate murder by sea would 
prove a useful weapon against the civiUsation of Europe ; 
"AH would be absolved by victory," was their formulae. 
It would be tedious to point out the folly of this, as of every 
other perversion. It is dangerous to challenge the Gods. It 
would be tedious to point out the obvious fact that human 
beings attempting inluiman things stop short, and that 
absolute inhumanity is unattainable by man. At any rate, 
the Prussian State undertook the foohsh policy of indis- 
criminate murder at sea. The Pmssian' General Staff 
proposed, under the advice of Ballin, not the summoning 
of contraband, but .the mere sinking of any ship, enemy or 
neutral, bringing anything whatsoever to the countries of 
the Allies, no matter what loss of life to innocent civilians, 
women and children included, or to neutrals, might be involved. 
It was clear that such a policy would necessarily threaten 
the most obvious, the most glaring, tlie most necessary rights 
of neutrals. In this great war the lesser neutrals might be 
cowed into admitting so monstrous a thesis ; but it was equally 
obvious that a neutral more powerful for the moment than 
any belligerent, remote in distance, enormous in power, would 
be challenged in its very vitals, and that neutral was the 
United States. Coincidcntly with the Russian "revolution," 
which was of such prodigious effect in favour of the enemy, 
came the virtually necessary adhesion of the United States 
and their entry into the field as Allies of the Entente. 
Observe the situation' created by these two coincident 
factors. Russia — in mere numbers one half of the AUied 
infantry power ; Russia, which had recently absorbed so 
large a part, through import, of the Allies' industrial effort — 
