I will now turn to the converse advantages and disadvantages afforded and imposed by geographical conditions upon the Allies.

The Geographical Advantages and Disadvantages of the Allies.

It has been apparent from the above in what way the geographical circumstance of Germany and Austria-Hungary advantaged and disadvantaged those two empires in the course of a war against East and West.

Let us next see how the Allies were advantaged and disadvantaged by their position.

1.  The first great disadvantage which the Allies most obviously suffer is their separation one from the other by the Germanic mass.

The same central position which gives Germany and Austria-Hungary their power of close intercommunion, of exactly coordinating all their movements, of using their armies like one army, and of dealing with rapidity alternate blows eastward and westward, produces contrary effects in the case of the Allies.  Even if hourly communication were possible by telegraph between the two main groups, French and Russian, that would not be at all the same thing as personal, sustained, and continuous contact such as is enjoyed by the group of their enemies.

But, as a fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is largely lacking.  The French and the Russians are in touch.  The commanders can and do pursue a combined plan.  But the communication of results and the corresponding arrangement of new dispositions are necessarily slow and gravely interrupted.  Indeed, it is, as we shall see in a moment, one of the main effects of geography upon this campaign that Russia must suffer during all its early stages a very severe isolation.

In general, the Allies as a whole suffer from the necessity under which they find themselves of working in two fields, remote the one from the other by a distance of some six hundred miles, not even connected by sea, and geographically most unfortunately independent.

2.  A second geographical disadvantage of the Allies consists in the fact that one of them, Great Britain, is in the main a maritime Power.

That this has great compensating advantages we shall also see, but for the moment we are taking the disadvantages separately, and, so counting them one by one, we must recognize that England’s being an island (her social structure industrialized and free from conscription, her interests not only those of Europe but those of such a commercial scattered empire as is always characteristic of secure maritime Powers) produces, in several of its aspects, a geographical weakness to the Allied position, and that for several reasons, which I will now tabulate:—­

(a) The position of England in the past, her very security as an island, has led her to reject the conception of universal service.  She could only, at the outset of hostilities, provide a small Expeditionary Force, the equivalent at the most of a thirtieth of the Allied forces.