The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great War

by Hilaire Belloc

Another instance. Both Powers have found their motor-buses extremely handy in this war. Paris has been almost bereft of them. London has been largely denuded of her normal supply. But a motor-bus carrying meat or even troops is not doing what it was specially designed to do—to wit, to run on the good roads of a great town, with a certain maximum load. It needs adaptation, it is used far more roughly, has a shorter life, and is being therefore more expensively consumed.

Here is one fairly graphic way of showing what this scale of supply means. Take an Army Corps of 40,000 men. That stands in meat alone for one year for about as many beasts. It means in clothing alone—initial expense—apart from waste of all kinds, and apart from weapons and auxiliary machinery, something between (counting accoutrement) a quarter and half a million pounds. It stands, in daily rations of bread alone, for nearly 200 sacks of wheat; in material equipment—initial, apart from ammunition—it stands in weapons and machines for at least another quarter of a million, in ready ammunition of small arms for at least £80,000, in shell for as much again.

To all this conception of scale you must add two more points. The soldier is moved in a way that the civilian is not. He is given at the expense of the State and not for his pleasure, the equivalent of a great quantity of lengthy excursions. He is taken across the sea, brought back on leave or in convalescence, moved from place to place by train or by mechanical traction, and all that upon a scale quite out of proportion to the narrow limits of his travel during civilian occupation. Within six months hundreds of thousands of Englishmen have been conveyed to the heart of France, moved again in that country over a space of more than a hundred miles, and a considerable proportion of them brought back and sent out again in the interval. Lastly, there is the indeterminate but heavy medical expense.

The second and last point in this consideration of scale is the enormously expensive element of uncertainty. It would be expensive enough to have to arrange for so much movement and so much clothing and equipment upon a wholly novel and increased scale, if we knew exactly what that movement and that equipment was to be—if, so to speak, you could take the problem statically and work out its details in an office as you work out the costings of a great shop or factory. But it is in the essence of an army that it should be mobile, moving suddenly and as quickly as possible where it is wanted, with no power of prediction as to how those moves may develop. You are “in” therefore, for an unknown factor of expense over and above the novelty and very high cost of the economic energy you suddenly bring into play with war. And that unknown factor is the extent to which you will be wasting and moving.

If considerations such as these give us some idea of the scale of supply, a further series of considerations will help us to appreciate the rate or pace at which the stream of supply must flow.

There are several ways in which this can be graphically presented through examples. Here are a few.

Great Britain controls half of the shipping of the world. She engages in the present war and part of her floating mercantile resources is suddenly required for the campaign. Those ships have to be constantly steaming, consuming coal, provisions for their crews, materials for repairs, at a far higher rate than their civilian use demanded; and the thing translates itself to the ordinary citizen in the shape of vastly increased freights and consequently increased prices for the imports received by this island.

Diagram III. Great Britain controls half the shipping of the world. She engages in war, and a part of her floating mercantile resources is suddenly required for the campaign. Those ships have to be constantly steaming, consuming coals, provisions, etc., at a far higher rate than their civilian use demanded; and the thing translates itself to the ordinary citizen in the shape of increased freights, and consequently increased prices for imports. The groups A, B and C combined represent the shipping of the world—A being foreign shipping. B and C together represent the whole of the British shipping, while the group C by itself represents the portion detached for the purposes of the war.

Here is another example. This country is as highly industrialized as any in the world. It is particularly fitted for the production of mechanical objects, and especially for mechanical objects in metal, yet suppose that even this country were asked suddenly (with no more than the plant it had before the war) to equip such a force as that with which the French defended their country last August—not to equip it with ammunition but with weapons and auxiliary machinery alone; the performance of such a task would have taken all the arms factories of Great Britain more than two years.