WEARING DOWN THE ENEMY.
TN the apparent lull caused by bad weather in France and 1 Flanders, General Smuts's cheery account of the military position for the Paris Journal is timely and encouraging. General Smuts, speaking as a soldier of proved competence, declares that the military aspect of the situation is satisfactory. " To-day we have conquered ; the victory is ours." His confidence in victory is fully shared by the Allied peoples, but we are not sure that even now the public clearly under- stand his reasons for the faith that is in him. When Sir Douglas Haig 'reports an advance, as at Vimy or St. Julien, a wave of optimism spreads over the land ; when, as in the last few weeks, the daily bulletins announce seemingly trivial trench-fighting, optimism gives place to uneasiness and to criticism of that eternal scapegoat, the Government of the day. What we have to realize, as General Smuts points out, is that the progress of the war cannot be judged by these daily messages from General Headquarters. The conflict is on too vast a scale to be decided by any one military operation, however great in proportion to the battles of the past. It is, as Sir Auckland Geddes said the other day, " a long-drawn war between nations wholly mobilized," and it will not end until the enemy nations, having exhausted their resources, are unable to continue the struggle. If we take this broad view of the war, we can see that the tactics adopted by the Allied commanders are in the long run certain to prove successful. We made a fundamental mistake, General Smuts admits, in thinking that the raising of large armies was the one thing needful. This war is above all a war of materials." It is a war of gun-power as well as of man- power, and to produce the gun, in all its new and varied forms, we have ha-I to reorganize industry at home before we could think of conquering in the field. But, having set ourselves to the task of providing the Army with an unlimited supply of the new machines of war, we have achieved in this respect an unquestioned superiority over the enemy. We have the whole world to draw upon for labour and materials ; he for his part is limited to Central Europe and the occupied regions, and his supplies of various essential materials like copper and rubber are running short. It now remains to turn this superiority in guns and munitions to the best account, and Sir Douglas Haig, with his colleagues, is doing so. His tactics are not showy, as General Smuts says, but they are sure. By concentrating an overwhelming mass of artillery on a limited sector of the enemy's lines, he makes it untenable and enables our infantry to advance with small loss. If the enemy regards the occupation of any sector as absolutely necessary for the safety of his lines, he must sacrifice thousands of his men in the attempt to hold it, and yet in the end he must fall back. The battle of the Somme was a complete vindication of Sir Douglas Haig's policy. The Germans held the strongest military defences that could be devised in the course of two years ; they brought up their hest troops and all their available guns to meet our attack. Yet they could not withstand our steady and persistent pressure, and after suffering appalling losses for six months they had to evacuate not merely the battered wrecks of the Somme lines but the whole district. Since the Somme our gun-power has been very greatly increased, and is still increasing. With each new advance this year, the British bombardment is reported to have become still more violent and crushing, and the numbers of stupefied prisoners captured in the shattered lines would have grown were it not the current practice of the enemy to hold his front lines more lightly than before because they cannot resist the British guns. The Germans cannot imitate our tactics. Their counter- attacks rarely if ever yield them even a momentary advantage, and it is long since they attempted a deliberate offensive, on any considerable scale, on the Western Front because they know that it would be hopeless. They are forced to remain on the defensive and to await Sir Douglas Haig's repeated blows, sustaining all the while continual losses without any military success to counterbalance the depressing effect on their spirits. Without haste but without rest, our armies are wearing down the enemy, and there can only be one end to such a process.
But, it will be said, a war of attrition like this must be interminable. Germany's man-power, though not unlimited, is still so great that she can stand the strain for a very long time to come, and meanwhile, it is argued, we shall suffer unduly. In the interests of clear thinking, we are glad to see that the French General Staff has allowed the publication of its estimates of German military strength, which show how much the Allies have done and how much there remains for them to do. The gross total of German manhood, between seventeen and forty-five, from the beginning of the war to January next, is placed at 14,000,000. This includes all boys who will have reached the age of seventeen by the end of this year, and is thus the maximum total. We must deduct, first of all, the dead, the prisoners, and the permanently disabled, and these the French estimate, not unreasonably, to number 4,000,000. It may be observed that the German casualty-lists to the end of July give the total as 2,338,327; but these lists have been repeatedly shown to be as untrust- worthy as any other German documents, and the enemy has an obvious motive for concealing or minimizing his losses. We must deduct, further, 500,000 wounded who at any given moment are in hospital ; they may be able to rejoin their regiments after an average period of four months, but for the time being are ineffective. There now remain 9,500,000 men possibly available. But of these the French Staff set aside 2,800,000 civilians who cannot be called up. Three- fourths of them are physically or mentally incapable ; half- a-million are employed in munition factories or in other work at home where they are indispensable ; the remaining 200,000 are resident abroad and cannot return. It may perhaps be questioned whether the estimate of 2,100,000 civilians unfit for military service is not too high, but there is evidence to show that the medically rejected have been " combed out " again and again since the war began, and the proportion remaining is far smaller than would be deemed possible here or in France or America. We have now reduced the total German man-power to 6,700,000. Of these, 600,000 are recruits of seventeen or eighteen, of the 1920 and 1919 classes, which will probably be called up in full by January. The German armies at present thus number at moat 6,100,000 men. It is a formidable total, larger indeed than that of the armies which had been mobilized and reinforced by the end of 1914. But the German armies of to-day arc not what they were in quality. At the outset they were all qualified to act as " shook troops " ; nowadays the enemy has to form picked companies to lead counter-attacks, as he cannot trust his ordinary battalions for any serious work. The boys and weedy men are often used to hold the front lines as a temporary screen for the better troops in the second line whence the counter-attacks are made. The inferior human material is ruthlessly sacrificed as " cannon-fodder " on the chance that the fitter men may thereby gain some military advantage. The enemy has multiplied his guns, his concrete " strong points " with machine-guns, and his gas-projectors and flame-throwers, but he cannot add to the number or improve the physique of his infantry. They are leas and less able to withstand our bombardments or to resist the attacks of our men ; the extraordinary feats performed by some of these heroes recently decorated, in capturing single- handed a score or more of prisoners, illustrate not only the majesty with which the British soldier fights, as Napier said, but also the declining spirit of his German opponent. Further, we must remember that the German armies of 1917, unlike those of 1914, have virtually no reserves to draw upon, except the immature boys who are now under seventeen. The French Staff estimates that while Germany added 2,450,000 men to her armies in 1915, she could only add 1,850,000 in 1916, and will not add more than 1,150,000 by the end of this year. The possible new levies for next year cannot much exceed half-a-million, which will not go far to balance the casualties.
The net result of these figures is that the Allies have accounted for 4,600,000 German soldiers, out of a possible total of 11,200,000, in three years of war. We have still to deal with the remaining 6,700,000 men. Many of them are good soldiers, but many more are far below the physical standards imposed by the intense labour of modern warfare. We must also remember that we are daily perfecting our methods of attrition. In the early days we could not destroy the enemy by thousands as we do now, unless indeed he chose to deliver massed attacks. Our gunfire was comparatively weak and intermittent ; we did not use gas ; our few aero- planes were mainly employed in range-finding for the gunners and had no leisure for bombing the enemy's trenches or billets. Therefore the Germans suffered little, except when they vainly tried to break through our defences. But during the last two years we have increased our means of offence on•
such a scale that we are now inflicting severe losses on the enemy every day and every hour. If one British shell in a hundred kills a German, the enemy's casualties under the ceaseless bombardment must be heavy on our long line from the sea to St. Quentin. But, apart from the ordinary shells, there are the gas-shells, the bombs from trench-mortars, the bombs or bullets from aeroplanes, the rifle-grenades, and the unending rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets falling on the enemy's lines, and killing or wounding hundreds of his men every day of the week. Our incessant trench raids account for hundreds more, and now and then an attack on a large scale puts thousands of the enemy out of action in an hour. That is to say, the process of attrition is continually being accelerated, although there may be very few dramatic episodes to record. The enemy is trying his hardest to economize his remaining men by trusting more and more to concrete and machinery ; but fortifications and guns must be held and served by flesh and blood, so that he cannot escape from his dilemma. The longer he holds on to his lines in France and Flanders, the more surely will his armies be worn away. If he retreats to new positions, he only delays but does not avert his fate. The optimism which General Smuts shares with the best military opinion in Europe and America is thus based on reasoned grounds. When the American troops come in strength to the fighting-line next year, the pace of the war will be quickened, and the end, we trust, will then be in sight.
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