n" 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 he