Are the Allies Winning?

In a Doubting Thomas article headed "Are We Winning?" the anonymous "Outis" in The Fortnightly Review concludes that "the Allies are winning, but very slowly. If their conquest is to be assured, Great Britain's task is to mobilize every soldier and every workman, in order to prove that whoever may fail, she at least does not intend to desist until the final triumph is won." Moreover, the conquest must be in the West "if anywhere," and he looks somewhat askance at the Dardanelles adventure:

A good many competent authorities have disliked the idea of the Dardanelles expedition, on the strength of a general principle applicable to all military operations. It is said that in every war there is one distinct objective, and that that should never be neglected for any subsidiary operations. Thus, in the present instance, our main effort is to drive the Germans out of France and Belgium, and then to attack them in their own territory. Anything which interferes with this or throws it, however temporarily, into the background, is held to be unwise, because it leads to the most dangerous of results in warfare—the dissipation of forces, which, if united, would win the desired success, but if disunited will probably fail. Thus we are told that we must not fritter away our energies in enterprises which, however important in themselves, are not comparable with the one unique preoccupation of our minds—the conquest of Germany in Europe.