Briefly to recapitulate, we may say that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in _Land and Water_, has undertaken and carried on since the beginning of the war a task which the vast majority of the English public is quite unable to undertake for itself. He was qualified to undertake that task, and has been enabled to carry it on by the fact that he has combined with a deep study of military history an exact knowledge of military science; by the knowledge he has gained from practical experience of army service; by the wide acquaintance he has made with the vast stretches of country in the indulgence of his tastes in travel and topography; by the long and thorough training he has passed through in the dispassionate examination of evidence; and, lastly, by the fact that he had long envisaged the possibility of this war. With this brief summary we may usefully contrast Mr. Belloc's own summary of his work already quoted in the early part of this chapter. In this he says: "My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." CHAPTER VI MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says, "who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr. Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed