Luckily for us, German necessities, as well as German doctrine, have involved very heavy wastage. And, luckily for us, that wastage has been particularly heavy in the matter of officers.
A discussion on numbers does not allow one to stray into the equally important moral factors of the war, but the fact may be just alluded to that the whole general military organism of Germany depends more than that of any other nation upon the gulf between the officer and those next in command. Not only can you make a French non-commissioned officer into an officer without fear of losing an atom of the moral strength of the French military organism, but the thing is done continually during peace and during war on a large scale. In Germany you can do nothing of the kind.
The attack in close formation, with all its obvious advantages of speed and with all the very fine tradition of discipline which makes it possible, is another element of expense, but most expensive of all is the determination to win at once.
Why have the Germans been thus prodigal of men in their determination to win rapidly? A long war is dreaded by Germany for four separate and equal reasons:
(1) That in a really considerable length of time two of her opponents are capable of indefinite expansion—Russia and Great Britain.
(2) Because all historical experience is there to show that the French are a nation that rally, and that unless you pin them after their first defeats their tenacity will be increasingly dangerous.
(3) Because the power of the British Fleet is capable of establishing a blockade more or less complete, and hitherto only less complete from political considerations.
(4) Because the strategical problem, the fighting upon two fronts, involves, as a method of victory, final success upon one front before you can be certain of success upon the other.
This last point merits illustration. An army fighting inferior bodies on two fronts is just like a very big man fighting two much smaller men. They can harass him more than their mere fighting power or weight accounts for, and they can do so because they are attacking upon different sides.
The big man so situated will certainly attempt to put out of action one of his two opponents before he puts his full force against the other. It would be a plan necessary to the situation, and it is exactly the same with a Power or a group of Powers fighting upon two fronts, although they find themselves in superior numbers on either front, as the Austro-Germans do still.