A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is not a bad thing to be reminded now and then that the one element of which account always has to be taken in war is chance. The story of the German aeroplane that came down in Belgium a fortnight or so ago is the latest proof of that. Bit by bit the story has leaked out, and there are enough bits by this time to make a whole. A German officer returning to the front with important papers, instead of going by train, persuaded a fellow-officer to take him by air. The aeroplane came down by mistake in Belgium ; the officer immediately tried to burn his papers but was stopped by Belgian soldiers, who took them from him. When under interrogation in a guard-room he suddenly snatched the papers from the table where they had been put, and flung them in the fire. But a Belgian officer retrieved them in time at the cost of a few burns, and on examination they were found to contain full plans for an invasion of Belgium. There seems to be good reason to think that but for their discovery the invasion would actually have taken place. In the last war one of the main reasons for the failure of the Nivelle offensive in 1917 was the capture of a French soldier with detailed plans on him. On the other side, it is impossible to estimate how much we owed to the foreknowledge of German plans due to the capture of the current code-book when the cruiser ' Magdeburg ' was wrecked in the Baltic. Money, munitions, morale—all vital ; yet chance can go far to outweigh them.
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