monarchy, whose homes and wealth are threatened.  “If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up Alsace.  How dare I do that?  To save Silesia I must expose East Prussia.  How dare I?  I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be saved.  I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium and from beyond the Rhine is defeat.”  The whole thing is an embroglio.  That conclusion is necessary and inexorable.  It would not appear at all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has come, the fatal choices must be made.  It may be that a strict, silent, and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will determine first some one retirement and then another.  It may be—­though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament—­that a defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate, Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem, another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German strategy will come.

The four corners are differently defensible—­Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm.  East Prussia has her natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit defence with small numbers.

Between the two groups, Eastern and Western, is all the space of Germany—­the space separating Aberdeen from London.  Between each part of each pair, in spite of an excellent railway system, is the block in the one case of the Ardennes and the Eifel, in the other of empty, ill-communicated Poland.  But each is strategically a separate thing; the political value of each a separate thing; the embarrassment between all four insuperable.

Such is the situation imposed by the geography of the European continent upon our enemies, with the opportunities and the drawbacks which that situation affords and imposes.

I repeat, upon the balance, our enemies had geographical opportunities far superior to our own.

Our power of partial blockade (to which I will return in a moment) is more than counterbalanced by the separation which Nature has determined between the two groups of Allies.  The ice of the North, the Narrows of the Dardanelles, establish this, as do the Narrows of the Scandinavian Straits.

The necessity of fighting upon two fronts, to which our enemies are compelled, is more than compensated by that natural arrangement of the Danube valley and of the Baltic plain which adds to the advantage of a central situation the power of rapid communication between East and West; while the chief embarrassment of our enemies in their geographical arrangement, which is the outlying situation of Hungary coupled with the presence of four vital regions at the four external corners of the German Empire, is rather political than geographical in nature.