THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 81, 5 April 1918, Page 6

THE WAR

rThe-'"hlgli military authority," in his review of the situation in France, emphasises the lull which is now fully established, hub offers no hint of what is to come next. He remarks.on the congestion from whioh.. the enemy is now busy extricating his forces—the inevitable result of long-continuedl assaults on the grand scale with division after division, moving forward through the lines of thosß that 'have gone before andl worked their way to a halt. This congestion, He says, is.especially severe in. the north, on the Arras front, where the Third Army completely stopped a very intense attack. The complete hold-up of such masses of troops, able to make only a small advance, means that division after divisional crushed into the same limited area, with far-greater confusion and difficulty in controlling the backwash of the tide than when ground is gained at each onslaught. The . enemy has two great tasks to carry out separately; he must clear his front of the vast debris of the first phase of the battle, and must prepare it for the second; if these two are to be done simultaneously. Bach necessarily hampers the other to some extent. On the Allied side similar work has to be done; and no man can say whioh side pan carry out the work more expeditioust. It must be observed, however, that c enemy has certain factors against him. His great transport operations have to "traverse a great area which has been stripped more or less of existing facilities, by the damage done deliberately or by chanoe to roads and railways; and he is operating within, a salient. The latter fact is in some ways a tactical advantage during a battle; but when vast transportation of ■ the nature now in hand is in question it reduces the routes for transport far below those available 'in similar country- on the 1 outride of the cia?ve..

The military authority makes an important reference to tho position in the air: "It might still be said that we are a long way from having tine command of the air." tJnfortuTiately the phrase •"command of the air" means different things to different people. One- man may mean, by it a bare majority of one flying service over another; a second, that the majority is so large as to amount to supremacy and give its possessor power to do what he wishes, except that ha has t<>. fight for. his rights 1, though without risk of losing them; a third, that there is no opposition worth naming. The last of these is certainly not the case with the Allies, as the daily reports show. It seems that the position is somewhere between ttie first definition and the second. The AHied airmen, taking the official reports as a guide, nave done surprising epceciition among the es@ny> and have killed far more German, flying machines than they lave lost; but it is obvious that the Germans have a large fund of energy and. skill in their flying services and that their aerial arm is not by any means swamped.

Sir H. S. Rawlinson has been suddenly recalled from his place on the Versailles War Council and placed in command of the British sth Army, the post having been rendered vacant by the sudden retirement of Sir Hubert Gough. The Daily Chronicle significantly remarks that the latter officer, who has risen from the command of a cavalry brigade in 1915, and who has had a high reputation, is at present unemployed. This is the first hint the cables have given that the failure to withstand the Germans' great offensive was due to something more than the mere weight of the attack. It will be remembered that the offensive was launched in the morning, after a bombardment jof extraordinary brevity as a preparation for 6Uch a great assault. Every assurance had been given to the public that the Army was ready to meet the blow when it fell, and the natural assumption was that it was known where it would fall. There had evidently been remarkably complete preparation for retreat, if such should prove necessary; but the obvious fact is that the command. did not know just where the Germans would strike, or did not know how hard they would strike. Otherwise the reserves, which were available then just as much as now, would have been ready to swing into position sooner, and the present grave peril of the armies' main lines of communication would not have developed with such speed. It is probably true, it certainly is generally accepted as a fact, and there is no reason to doubt, that an assault delivered in enormous force and regardless of cost cannot be completely held; it is bound to give results. But ■whatever the prearranged plans of the IBrftiith !%h pgmtHiJhf eSnSfetntJte^a i& tm W.»y efyeHveaent before tha ensmy'e

pressure, they probably did not contenv plato quite so much as has happened.

The enemy's .first""rush has beesi, stayed by a dual process, on the one liand 1 the magnificent work of the rearguards who took toll of his numbers, and on the other the inevitable out-running of essentials for heavy fighting, which, as must be the case in such circumstances, has made the enemy "fall on his face." So far, so good. The question still remains whether there was failure to grasp the situation clearly while it was yet developing; whether the Germans were allowed to get too big a start; whether the firet electrical success of their infantry rush was due to surprise. The reversal of the victory .at Cambrai was^ the result of surprise, of failure to realise that great German reserves were available, and that the weak southern flank of the new ealient simply invited what happened. When such a surprise as that was possible, it must be realised that something similar, but bigger, was also possible—especially on a great front everywhere ewarming with activity —in spite of the keen oversight of many airmen.

t .The damage, however, is done. There is; nothing for it now-but to undo it in the best and most rapid way possible, and the great battle is. now in its most tense and tantalising stage. Tile first phase is over and has brought no decision. Yon Hindenburg's men have marched themselves to a standstill; Haig's have their backs to the wall; and both are being reinforced to the utmost. There is vast tension on. the front, the L 'correspondents say, and no wonder.' Eventhe shock of renewed battle will be a relief, for it will at least show which side* is readiest. There is not yet the slightest sign that will help to decide this question. All that is available is the general survey that speaks of enemy divisions gathered from all parts of the front, and of British, French, and Americans on the move. Meantime the Germans are demonstrating with their, guns on various sectors, including Flanders, where possibly they contemplate a secondary movement against the British garrisons, far. thinner no doubt in that region than they have been at any time since the early days on the Yser.

_ Most( inopportune and even dangerous is the reappearance, at this moment of an old! friend. Ha is the mysterious "neutral traveler" or "neutral observer" who periodically pops his head ever the wall of the central nations and tells a thrilling, tale of the awful time they are having inside. He seldom speaks much of the enemy's determination to win—or not to be beaten, which .is exactly.the same thing; or if he does, he butters it over with tales of starvation and hunger typhus and widespread inclination for peace. Nobody seems to trouble about the facility with which other neutral observers can spread and find credulous readers for exactly similar stories about üb. The neutral observer, using the term quite impartially, is all things to all men; he speaks to please those he is amongst, either because he has ends to serve, because he knows they like to be pleased, or because he is asked leading questions. Ho is, with, the exception of the illogical pacifist, the most dangerous counsellor we can listen to, and one of the most difficult to refuse a hearing. It may be that every word he tells w time, so far as it goes. But even if it is, *Uere ia Sn infinite deal he does not say. What he reports is interesting, but it is quite unimportant, and its unimportance would be plain if ha told the whole truth.

The enemy nations have passed through exactly the Same period of war as the Allies—just three years and six months. They have sustained in that time, from quite an early stage in the war, a strain economic and moral, unprecedented in history ,_ In much less trying conditions the Allied nations have as a whole gonfi far beyond the first enthusiasm of warmaking and are fighting with a determination which is only maintained by the deliberate exercise of will-power. The enemy's condition as to determination to proceed would be, other things being equal, much weaker than that of the Entente group and , because of the greater strain. But the other conditions are not equal. The Germanic combine of peoples is sustained by the war-map and its steady growth, guarantees of vast military achievements that have added and gone on adding^ and seeming guarantees of a future success that.shall win all in the end. To-day there comes a neutral with a. tale of popular discontent, of demands that the war shall be stopped, Germans and Austrians who are hungry now, but who, it must be remembered,'have been hungry for years. Yet to-day Germany has, on paper, added to the war-map a slice of ground previously won from her by the most powerful of her enemies, retaken from that very enemy at the height of his strength. She is fresh from having inflicted on Italy the greatest defeat suffered by any of the great Powers in this war; and from having stolen & vast portion of Russia. Weeping mothers and sisters mourning the heapedup dead on the fields of Santeri-a will not be heard in Germany to-day; and the Kaigerand his faithful ones have no time to listen to hungry Viennese. It is no time for us to listen to neutrals, observant or otherwise. .There is too much to do> in France.