LAND AND WATER 
January 16, IDIJ* 
pushed to extremities, will compel him to " scrap " 
one of the four corners, yet each one is for some 
folitical reason especially dear to him, and even 
perhaps necessary to him. Each he desires with 
alternating anxieties and indecisions to preserve 
atall costs from invasion, yet he cannot, as he is 
forced upon the defensive, preserve all four. 
Here, again, the ideal situation for him would 
be to possess against the invader an arrangement 
in which, if he is compelled to consider four special 
zones of territory more important than the mass of 
his territory, he would have the advantage of 
knowing that they were clearly distinguishable into 
less and more important, and the further advan- 
tage of knowing that the more important the terri- 
tory was the more central it was, and the better 
protected against invasion. 
Thus, in this last and fourth diagram the 
government of the general oblong, A- A- A- A, dis- 
tinguished four special zones, the protection of 
which from invasion is important, but which vary 
in the degree of their importance; the least im- 
portant is the outermost, lightly shaded (1) ; more 
important is an inner one (2) ; still more important 
is (3), and most important of all is the black core 
of the whole. 
Some such arrangement has been the salvation 
of France time and time again, notably in the 
Spanish wars, and in the wars of Louis XIV., and 
in the wars of the Revolution. To some extent you 
have seen the same thing in the present war. 
To save Paris was exceedingly important, 
next came the zone outside Paris, and so on up to 
the frontier. But with the modern German Em- 
pire it is exactly the other way, and the situation 
is that which we find in Diagram 3, which I here 
repeat 
Diagram Iff. 
C 
(M 
The four external corners are the essentials which 
must be preserved from invasion, and if any one of 
them goes, the whole political situation is at once 
in grave peril. 
The strategical position of modern Germany 
Is embarrassed, because each of these four corners 
must be saved by the armies. 1 is Belgium ; 2 is 
East Prussia; 3 is Alsace-Lorraine; 4 is Silesia; 
and the German commanders, as well as the 
German Government, must remain to the last 
moment in grave indecision as to which of the foiTF 
can best be spared when invasion threatens, or, as 
is more probable, must disperse their forces in the 
attempt to hold all four at once. It is a situation 
which has but rarely occurred before in the history 
of war, and which has always proved disastrous. 
I sum up, then, and I say that geographical 
considerations must, if the campaign proceeds 
upon the same lines as it has hitherto followed— 
the Germans defending themselves in company 
with a not too confident pair of Allies against their 
enemies to the East and the West — heavily em- 
barrass the strategy of the enemy because they 
first tend to detach those uncertain Allies; 
secondly, leave the German Empire itself in con- 
fusion between the necessity of sacrificing sooner 
or later one of four quite separate, apparently 
equally important, and all of them outlying corners 
of the area now occupied by the German armies. 
Such is the general proposition, the details of 
which I will examine and, I hope, prove. 
II.-PARTICULAR. 
1. The j^olitical embarrassment due to the geo- 
graphical position of Austria-Hungary. 
We have already considered in a diagram the 
way in which the geographical disposition of Aus- 
tria-Hungary weakens Germany in the face of the 
Allies. For the sake of clearness, let us repeat 
that diagram here. 
Translated into terms of actual political 
geography, these two oblongs, with their separate 
parts, are, as a fact, as follows; where A is the 
German Empire ; the shaded portion B is the un- 
certain ally, Austria-Hungary, so far as that 
portion is now free from Russian armies, and this 
last divided by the frontier, R-S into B-1, the more 
certain Austrian part, and B-2, the less certain 
Hungarian part, the latter of which is only pro- 
tected from assault by the Carpathian range of 
mountains C-C-C-C, with its passes at D-D-D. 
M, the enemy on the right, Russia, is attacking the 
Alliance A-B along X-X-X, while the enemy oft' 
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