LONDON, July 3, 1916 (UP) - Success in modern warfare isn't measured in terms of real estate.
If it were, Great Britain and her allies might point with considerable pride to the acquisition in the last two years of more than three times the acreage of the German Empire.
The second anniversary of the war finds the allies in possession of all the former great Teutonic colonies except German East Africa. Latest advices indicate that this particular parcel of land is about to fall into the hands of General Smuts and his Belgian and Portugese friends - a mere matter of some 384,079 square miles, or in itself 175,299 square miles larger than Germany.
But as Napoleon observed, the smashing of armies is the only thing that matters. Germany's armies are to-day just as much unsmashed as they were two years ago. The outposts may be regarded as negligible. Of little more account, in their border aspects, have been the misfortunes of the allies in Galipoli, Mesopotamia, and the Balkans.
The last year on the western front has been one of stale-mate. There have been tremendous losses on both sides, but the lines of the opposing armies follow much the same course as they did in August of 1915. Each has bitten a few slices out of the other's territory: certain important positions have been captured and some of them have been recaptured, but one requires a large-scale map and fairly good eye-sight to detect the changes. Both armies, their losses recruited, remain unbroken.
Under the new style of intensive trench warfare which has been steadily developing on this front during the two years, the defenses of each have apparently become impregnable. The objective of the "big push" in these latter days is not so much to break through to the Rhine, or to the Channel ports, as it is to inflict the greatest possible damage upon the other side.
"Attrition" has become the motto of the western front for both armies. Granted enough powerful guns, with sufficient ammunition, concentrated upon any one sector, either may at any time clean up the intervening wire entanglements, demolish the opposing front line trenches and occupy their ruins - only to find further progress blocked by more intricate and more elaborate defenses in the rear. Ypres, Loos, Hooge, and even Verdun are no longer of especial consequence in the military sense. They are merely geographical points - with much more geography, even more strongly defended, spread out behind them.
Great Britain still is paying the penalty of unpreparedness; or if you don't like it put that way, Germany still is reaping the fruits of preparedness. That Sir Douglas Haig has failed seriously to dent the enemy's lines is no greater reflection upon his military skill than the failures of his predecessor, General French, were upon his. True, he has had more men, and, within recent months, thanks to the organizing genius of Lloyd George, more munitions - but he has had a longer line to cover. The British now occupy trenches extending from the Channel of Maricourt - with the exception of a very small sector held by the Belgians - a total distance of more than 100 miles, or nearly one-fourth of the entire western front. Furthermore, he is maintaining heavy reserves, subject to any call for help from the French.
But Haig's armies are suffering from the same defect as those of his predecessor: they are inadequately officered, especially in the staff department. In nearly every instance since the war started, where the British armies have met with reverse or have failed to attain the immediate object of their offensive, this has been directly traceable to inefficient co-ordination of staff work. The reason is very simple: it has been a game of amateurs against professionals. England lost many of her most capable and promising officers in the early days of the war. She has not only to fill their places, but to train others in sufficient numbers to supply an army that is now ten times the size of the one she had on August 4, 1914. Manifestly this period has been much too short wherein to compete with the staff efficiency of a military machine of forty years' standing.
But if Britain's successes in the field have not been overly brilliant, no one will dispute that her achievement in recruiting, organizing, training and equipping an army of more than five million men since the war began - and on the voluntary principle, too - has been one of the marvels of military history.
Adding to this number those who have been brought in under the recent conscription act - somewhat less than a million - and those employed in the munitions and naval shipbuilding industries, the second anniversary of the war finds approximately eight million men and women directly engaged in war work or in other words, one person out of every six in the United Kingdom.
This feat is all the more remarkable when one considers that Britain was not a military nation, in the sense that the others were.
It was this deficiency of vision that caused the British public to pile upon one man's shoulders what eventually proved too gigantic a burden for him - or any other man - to bear.
There is no discredit to the late war secretary in saying that he failed, in part. As an organizer and trainer of human war material he was superb. England's new army was properly labeled "Kitchener's Army." On the mechanical side of modern warfare he was lacking in genius.
Then England woke up. It was suddenly realized that this was no one man's war. Lloyd George was made minister of munitions with authority to commandeer the industries of the country.
