tions, but as a thing prepared in the scientist's laboratory. The personal factor was subordinated to the machine, and Napoleon's great maxim, 'Je m'engage et puis je vois,' became the watchword of an outworn creed. The victories of science over matter the conquest of the air, the discovery of wireless telegraphy, the development of motor-traction, the achievements of chemistry in the matter of high explosives, and so on-tended to emphasize the change in the character of war, and worked to the advantage of the power which was at once most industrious in the practical applications of science and most concerned in making those applications subservient to the needs of war.

That a nation so saturated with the thought of war and so rightly conscious of its superiority over all its rivals should have regarded itself as invincible, calls for no surprise. The confidence of the Germans in their machine had a foundation as solid and absolute as any human calculation about calculable things can have. On the spiritual side they were universally wrong. They miscalculated Belgium, they misread England, they woefully underrated France, they blundered in their estimate of the ability of Austria to hold Russia in check while France was being crushed. But on the material side they were substantially right.

If we judge German generalship by strictly military considerations, as distinct from the political and imaginative factors, we are bound to admit that its success has been complete. The machine has been a miracle of efficiency, and if preparedness for war were the final condition of victory, Germany would have been master of Europe and, indeed, of the world, in six months. The advantage with which Germany started was due primarily no doubt to the initiative inherent in the unprovoked war.

The state which lays its plans with the deliberate purpose of striking its blow when its enemy is not looking must always have the whip-hand of the state which stands on the defensive and will fight only under provocation. But apart from this advantage, the Germans came into the field with a much more deeply and truly considered theory of the mechanism of war under modern conditions than any of their foes possessed. Their system of the General Staff, in operation for generations, had brought to bear on all the problems of war a mass of learning which had no parallel in any other country and which had won for Germany the admiration of the official military class in all the neutral countries. Prussia was the military academy in which most of the generals of those countries had graduated. Even General Yanushkevitch, the chief of the Russian General Staff at the opening of the war, had received his military education in Germany.

Against this elaborately systematized thought directed to definite ends, the Allies had little to offer but improvised methods. They had no common strategy, no body of agreed doctrine. France had passed through a series of military convulsions which made a coherent and steadily maintained theory impossible. The Russian military system was as corrupt and inefficient as other departments of Russian official life. The revelations of the Russo-Japanese war had done little to cleanse the Augean stables, and only a few weeks before the crisis came it was stated in the Duma, and not denied, that there were 2000 generals in the Russian Army against 350 in the French Army, and that of these the vast majority had received their rank, not for military merit, but through patronage or social influence. Of the younger generals only 25 per cent had passed through the regimental mill, and of 300 colonels of most

In England the case, for other reasons, was no better. Even in the eighteenth century Chatham had declared, "The Navy is the Standing Army of England,' and the idea of intervention in continental warfare had almost ceased to belong to the realm of practical considerations. No army had in the last generation seen fighting in so many and such various fields as the British Army, but the fields were remote, the scale small, and the methods antiquated. Hard thinking is not a British characteristic, nor is organization a thing for which the Englishman has an affection. We had muddled through the Boer War at infinite sacrifice, and the Army was still very largely a social asset into which the sons of the aristocracy went to learn polo. Mr. Haldane, with his doctrine of 'clearthinking' and efficiency, did something to modernize the machine and even introduced the idea of the General Staff in a modest form. It was his War Book which enabled the little British Army to play so prompt and striking a part in the first episode of the war; but that was an isolated incident. Behind it was a blank to be filled in with a fury of improvisation.

II

It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that when the clash came it was found that the Germans were easily first in their theories. Take the matter of fortications. They had seen that the modern weapon of offense had made the fortress obsolete except as a centre of widespread operations. The same view had been put forward elsewhere by lay thinkers like Sir Sydenham Clarke (Lord Sydenham), who had advocated earthworks as against forts which offered a fixed target for great mobile how

-

upon the fortresses. The collapse of Namur and the fortresses on the Belgian border was the first evidence that in military thought the Germans were decisively superior. As the war progressed, especially on the Russian front, the fact on which the Germans had calculated that the modern gun would dominate the fort was established with terrible emphasis. It was only on the Verdun-Toul line that the fortress retained an appearance of supremacy, but it was a supremacy based upon the fact that the country lent itself to a wide defensive system which reduced the fort to the function of a dépôt for the field operations of a great army. The fortress qua fortress had vanished as an article of military faith.

Not less sound was the doctrine of the Germans as to the use of the big gun in field warfare. The French General Staff had pinned their faith to the 75 mm. and had resisted every proposal for the employment of heavy artillery in the field. When the Caillaux ministry was in office, an attempt was made to provide the army with big guns for field work, and ten millions sterling were voted for the purpose. But though the scheme went through, it was disapproved of by the military experts, and with the fall of the Caillaux ministry it was quickly dropped. The ground of objection on the part of professional opinion was that the use of heavy guns would destroy the mobility of the army and embarrass its operations. Assuming that war was still an affair of rapid movement and swift, decisive action, this was a tenable view; but the battle of Mukden was the portent of a fundamental change of method profoundly affecting the material requirements of an army in the field. The Germans alone fully appreciated the meaning of that change. In the early stages of the war, while the armies were sway

ing to and fro over northern France, their big guns were doubtless an embarrassment. They could not keep pace with the rapid movement, and were unable to influence events in the supreme crisis of the Marne. But when the struggle had settled down into permanent trench warfare, the big guns for the field became a factor of the first importance, and the French doctrine was found to have no relation to the warfare initiated at Mukden and rendered inevitable by the scale and equipment of modern armies.

In the associated problem of the use of the high-explosive shell the Germans were equally right and the Allies equally wrong. Nothing is more remarkable as showing the obstinate conservatism of professional thought, than the precious months lost before the French and the English generals came to admit that their reliance on shrapnel in trench warfare was a fatal mistake. The great shell controversy in England developed into an attack on the politicians, but it was not the politicians either in England or France who were to blame: it was the soldiers. They seemed afflicted with an inability to see the most elementary fact of the war. In conversation, they would admit that it was the German high-explosive shell which was doing the destruction in their own lines; but in the same breath they would reaffirm their faith in shrapnel so far as the retaliation on the enemy was concerned. Indeed, it was not until the politicians intervened that this enormous heresy was got rid of. It was the appointment of Mr. Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions in England and of M. Thomas to the same position in France that brought the Allies at last into touch with the bedrock facts about big guns and highexplosive shells.

The case was much the same in regard to the machine-gun. It would

have seemed to the average man that there could be no doubt as to the importance of that weapon in any kind of warfare; but the Germans alone entered on the war with a real understanding of the part it was destined to play. In the English Army, and to a large extent in the French Army as well, the machinegun was a sort of luxury, and for months it remained a sort of luxury. In the German Army it was from the first the real instrument of defense. At the end of nine months of war the equipment of the English was in the proportion of two machine-guns to ten on the side of the Germans, and not for a year was this dreadful handicap substantially diminished. The bearing of this fact on the course of the trench warfare was immensely important to the Germans. They were able to hold their advanced trenches with a minimum of men, while we had to hold ours with the maximum. In a word, we used men where they used the machine.

That the Germans looked confidently for a swift triumph in the field is undoubted; but that they had also foreseen the possibility of the trench warfare is evident, not only from all this preparation, but also from the promptness with which they brought into play the hand-grenade and the trench-mortar. The revival of these obsolete weapons was an inevitable consequence of the siege warfare, but only the Germans were prepared. Evidently they alone had seriously and minutely considered the possibility of the static struggle. For a considerable time after the great parallel lines from Flanders to Switzerland had been drawn, the Germans were using an abundance of perfectly manufactured hand-bombs, while their foes could reply only with crude improvisations of an extremely inferior sort.

It is still an open question whether the elaborate German method of constructing trenches is sound. The deep

excavation and the concrete linings have important advantages, but in the case of a heavy bombardment they are of very doubtful wisdom, for men have more chance of escape from a fall of natural soil than from the collapse of deep concrete structures. However, the promptness with which the Germans laid these underground fortifications for hundreds of miles is an evidence of their meticulous care and astonishing preparedness for all eventualities. It is this fact which has given the British officer so high a respect for German military thinking. 'When the Germans do something in a different way from ours,' said a distinguished officer at Genral Headquarters to me, 'the chances are that it is a better way than ours.'

This I found to be a generally accepted view at the front. Much scorn, for example, has been poured on the place which the German officer takes in attack. He does not lead his men, but drives them. On the face of it, this method shows badly against the French and English tradition by which the officer gives his men the example of gallantry. That example governs the whole relationship of officers and men and invests war with a spirit of chivalry and sacrifice which is an important military asset. But on the other hand, the price it exacts in the mortality of officers is a grave set-off, and the Germans, who are always realists in their methods, regard the price as too high for the gain it brings. And though the British tradition is too deep-rooted to be destroyed, I found a very widespread conviction among the British officers that, as a matter of practical loss and gain, the German system was probably right in trench warfare if not in the free action of the field.

III

There is much less disposition to approve of another phase of German

military thought. The massed attack has, on the whole, been found to be a great and costly failure. To justify the enormous sacrifice which it involves, it must have a decisive and unequivocal success. On no occasion has it been attended with such a success. The sacrifice has been made, but the end has never been gained, and with the serious diminution in the man-power of Germany and the great improvement in the munitioning of the Allies there has been a marked tendency to avoid this reckless staking of life. It is clear that no artillery preparation so far found to be practicable is adequate to give the gamble a reasonable chance of success.

In one sphere of the war the Germans have been decisively inferior. The Allies, almost from the beginning, have established a definite mastery in the air, and, though much alarm was caused by the feats of the Fokker, that mastery is still maintained. In this connection I refer only to the aeroplane. So far as the airship is concerned the Germans have been simply unchallenged. They had devoted immense thought and expenditure to this weapon and clearly looked to it as destined to offset, in large measure, the naval supremacy of Britain. It cannot be denied that as an instrument of 'frightfulness' it has justified itself. It has made the darkness terrible, not to London only but to all England; it has destroyed many innocent lives and created widespread alarm. But in a strict military sense it has so far been literally negligible, for it can operate only in the dark and its bombs are dropped at random, or, at best, by guesswork. Even indirectly it has had no military value. It has caused alarm and indignation, but no panic; and in a real sense it has served a useful purpose by making England realize the actualities of war. There will 1 This paper was written immediately before the great attack on Verdun. -THE EDITORS.

be no labor troubles in the wake of the Zeppelin. It may be doubted, therefore, whether even in the case of the airship the Germans have really scored.

So far as the aeroplane is concerned their inferiority has been unquestioned. The reason for this is obvious. No amount of thinking and organization can secure the command of the air unaided. Given equal inventivenessand the French and the English are certainly not inferior in this respect the governing factor of the war in the air is the quality of individual daring and independent resource. In this quality the Germans are indisputably inferior. Their system relies upon a collective discipline. The individual is merged in the mass, and, divorced from the mass, he is the inferior fighting animal. Bernhardi realized this grave defect of the Prussian system and urgently advocated the cultivation of individual initiative in the soldiery; but the war has shown that his advocacy has been vain. Indeed, the development of the individual is obviously incompatible with the harsh mechanism of the Prussian system, and it is that fact which will govern the final verdict on German military thought. It sacrifices the man to the machine. In a war of sudden impetus the perfect machine wins; the longer the war lasts, however, the more does the human factor assert its authority. It is possible in the course of a prolonged struggle to equalize the machinery of war, but not to equalize the human element. The Allies have learned the science of war from the Germans, and, having learned it, they possess a superior quality of material with which to apply it.

If the Germans, on the whole, started with the sounder theories as to the methods of war, their advantage in the matter of strategy should have been even more decisive. That advantage was founded, not merely on the pro

found study which the General Staff had for a generation devoted to the problem. In that study they had the advantage which belongs to a deliberate policy of aggression. They laid their plans for a war which would come at their own time and in their own way, and in which they would have the ele ment of surprise and the command of the initiative. In a very real sense they alone had a strategy conceived on large and comprehensive lines and based on really calculable considerations. The Allies had never discussed the strategy of a possible war in a collective way. Beyond the secret understanding between England and France that, in the event of the invasion of Belgium, the British Army should go to the defense of that country, there was no strategic preparation on the part of the two countries, and the idea that England would raise an army on the continental scale was never contemplated. Her task was the command of the sea and the defense of her own shores. Italy, so far from being involved in the general strategy of the Allies, was at that time nominally an ally of Germany. The relations between France and Russia had been more intimate, but in so far as they had discussed a common strategy it was the strategy of defense in unknown circumstances at an unknown time. It conceded the initiative to Germany as the corollary of unalterable facts.

Those facts were not limited to the known supremacy of the German military machine. The geographical position of Germany alone was a decisive factor in the dictation of the initiative. She had her ally, not separated by land or sea, but solidly at her back, and, working on interior lines, she could calculate on dealing with her enemies in detail, and on bringing the whole weight of her resources to any given point with a minimum of delay. This advantage