Just how the people who use the word “exhaustion” so freely are prepared to define it, is a matter for speculation.  The idea seems to be a phase in which the production of equipped forces ceases through the using up of men or material or both.  If the exhaustion is fairly mutual, it need not be decisive for a long time.  It may mean simply an ebb of vigour on both sides, unusual hardship, a general social and economic disorganisation and grading down.  The fact that a great killing off of men is implicit in the process, and that the survivors will be largely under discipline, militates against the idea that the end may come suddenly through a vigorous revolutionary outbreak.  Exhaustion is likely to be a very long and very thorough process, extending over years.  A “war of attrition” may last into 1918 or 1919, and may bring us to conditions of strain and deprivation still only very vaguely imagined.  What happens in the Turkish Empire or India or America or elsewhere may extend the areas of waste and accelerate or retard the process, but is quite unlikely to end it.

Let us ask now which of the combatants is likely to undergo exhaustion most rapidly, and what is of equal or greater importance, which is likely to feel it first and most?  No doubt there is a bias in my mind, but it seems to me that the odds are on the whole heavily against the Central Powers.  Their peculiar German virtue, their tremendously complete organisation, which enabled them to put so large a proportion of their total resources into their first onslaught and to make so great and rapid a recovery in the spring of 1915, leaves them with less to draw upon now.  Out of a smaller fortune they have spent a larger sum.  They are blockaded to a very considerable extent, and against them fight not merely the resources of the Allies, but, thanks to the complete British victory in the sea struggle, the purchasable resources of all the world.

Conceivably the Central Powers will draw upon the resources of their Balkan and Asiatic allies, but the extent to which they can do that may very easily be over-estimated.  There is a limit to the power for treason of these supposititious German monarchs that Western folly has permitted to possess these Balkan thrones—­thrones which need never have been thrones at all—­and none of the Balkan peoples is likely to witness with enthusiasm the complete looting of its country in the German interest by a German court.  Germany will have to pay on the nail for most of her Balkan help.  She will have to put more into the Balkans than she takes out.

Compared with the world behind the Allies the Turkish Empire is a country of mountains, desert and undeveloped lands.  To develop these regions into a source of supplies under the strains and shortages of war-time, will be an immense and dangerous undertaking for Germany.  She may open mines she may never work, build railways that others will enjoy, sow harvests for alien reaping.  The people the Bulgarians want in Bulgaria are not Germans but Bulgarians; the people the Turks want in Anatolia are not Germans but Turks.  And for all these tasks Germany must send men.  Men?