It takes about five months to produce a heavy piece, and the rate of production of heavy ammunition, though slow, is measurable.  At the moment of writing this, towards the close of the second period, the balance is not yet redressed, but it is in a fair way to be redressed.  The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching preponderance in numbers.

Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the war, we will turn to the moral opposition of military theory between the one party and the other, and show how here again that, save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy, the enemy was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that matter, reasonably expected.

(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR.

The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that considerable period.  The South African and the Manchurian war had indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained untried at its outbreak.

The war in its first six months thoroughly tested these theories, and proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and which unsound.  I will tabulate them here, and beg the special attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts the first fortunes of the war depended.

I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the English believed to be possible.

The point is this:  After a certain proportion of losses inflicted within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a standstill.  That was the universal experience of all past war.  When the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill, the attack fails.  But what you cannot determine until you test the matter in actual war is what numbers of losses in what time will thus destroy an offensive movement.  You cannot determine it, because the chief element in the calculation is the state of the soldier’s mind, and that is not a measurable thing.  One had only the lessons of the past to help one.