Diagram V. An important point in connexion with supply is the delicacy of the whole business and the peril of its embarrassment. The diagram concerns only one tiny detail of the process—no more than the supply of ammunition to one part of a division out of the hundreds of divisions that build up an army. It shows how the ammunition is sorted and distributed from an ammunition park to the men in the front line; the complexity under actual conditions of service being apt to be far more tangled and diversified, according to circumstances.
Observe the fifth diagram, which concerns only one tiny detail of the process; no more than the supply of ammunition (out of all that has to be supplied) and no more than the ammunition of one part of a division (excluding cavalry) out of the hundreds of divisions and more that build up one of these great national armies. Even that diagram, complex as it is, does not nearly represent the whole complexity even of so small a fraction, but is sufficient to illustrate my case.
Such a machine or organization, by which an army lives, and in the collapse of which an army rapidly ceases to be, is clearly at the mercy of the least disorder. It is indeed protected by the most careful dispositions, and everything is done to safeguard its gathering strands, as they unite towards the base, from interruption. But conceive what the effect of such interruption would be, or even the menace of it! Deduce from this the importance where such a vast body of men is concerned, of freedom from embarrassment in the minds of those who have to direct the operation of the almost infinite skein!
It is this point, the peril of embarrassment, which is—at the moment in which I am writing these lines—of such capital importance in connection with the question of blockade. We may blockade an enemy’s resources and say: “With very careful economy he has food for nine-tenths of the year”; or, “Though already anxious for the future, he has sufficient copper for his shell and cartridge cases for some time to come”; or, “Though already the Government is forbidding the sale of petrol, the enemy can, for some time to come, supply his mechanical transport.” But the mere numerical calculation of his decreasing resources is no guide to the moral disorder which the peril alone may cause. The elasticity of the whole machine is at once affected from the mere knowledge that abnormal economy is demanded. The directing brain of it is disturbed in an increasing degree as civilian necessities mix with the already severe strain upon the supplies of the army.
To produce such a confusion, moral as well as material, is the directing motive of blockade, and the success of such a policy begins long before the point of grave material embarrassment is reached.
It is on this account that nations fighting with their whole strength, as modern nations in competition with the detestable Prussian model are compelled to fight, must ultimately, willy-nilly, turn to the policy of complete blockade, and that the success of this policy attempted by both parties to a struggle—necessarily better achieved by one than by the other—will perhaps more largely than anything else determine—seeing what the complexity of national commerce now is—the issue of a great modern war.
WAR TO-DAY AND YESTERDAY
This war, in many ways, is quite different from any war in the past. The length of defensive lines, the development of field fortification and of big guns, and other important matters are dealt with in the following pages.