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. For all these four reasons, then, Germany was bound to waste men, and she did waste men largely until about the end of last year. She threw them away recklessly during the first advance on Paris, next during the great attacks in Flanders, then--quite separately--in her desperate Polish effort to reach Warsaw, which goal, at the moment of writing, she has wholly failed to attain. But though we know that Germany and Austro-Hungary have lost men in a greater proportion than the Western Allies, and though we may guess that they have lost men in a greater proportion than our Eastern Allies--in spite of the heavy losses in prisoners at Tannenberg--it is less easy to give an accurate estimate of the proportion. In one case and up to one date we can arrive pretty accurately at the proportion. The German Empire alone had, up to a particular date in the autumn, lost in hit, sick, and caught (I will speak in a moment of the question of “returns”) 40 per cent. of the individuals up to that date put into the field. Both the French and the English had up to the same date lost just under 25 per cent.