We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in _Land and Water_ in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it is possible for him to give. There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex, which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness appears very plainly in a passage in _A General Sketch of the European War_, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round the point where they met. To illustrate the position of the Allied force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan: Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer under these disadvantages: