LAND & WATER 
December 28, 1917 
The Historical Sites of War 
By Hiiaire Belloc 
THERE is a most aiTosting historical jjoint in con- 
nection with the great campaigns of this war, so 
academic that it seems cold to consider it, yet of 
jx-rmanent interest : It is the extent to which 
military eflort has followed the roads of the past, has been 
checked by the old strongholds and has been directed towards 
the old key jwints f and the extent to wlii<h these apparently 
unchangeable geographical groo\'es of history ha\'e l>een 
moditicd and new ones created by modern men. 
The similarity is certainh- more striking than the modifica- 
tions. The extent to which sites essential to the military 
history of tlic past have reappeared in the last four years 
has struck the imagination of the world. 
If we tabulate only the principal (^nes of these recurrent 
bitts and routes, the parallel is striking enough. 
The two roads which menace Gaul from the .east, are that 
by the Plains to the north of the Ardennes, and that by the 
gap to the south between those hills and forests and the 
A'osges — the gap of Lorraine. Both reappear at once at the 
origin of this campaign as the routes of invasion. The point 
of crossing the Sambre for the possession of the Belgian plains 
was also rcjjcated. The Battle of Charleroi recalls the chief 
bridge whereby Napoleon's forces traversed that stream. 
.More singular still perhaps, so vast a conflict as the Marne 
turned upon the general district (though not the actual few 
miles) which saw the determination of the other great threat 
to Europe — the invasion of At^ila. The right of Foch's 
advancing army, after it had done the trick at La Fere Cham- 
penoise, was v-ery near the liuge ring which is still traditionally 
known as the Camp of Attila. And those same heights above 
the rolling ground of Champagne and of the Plains of Chalons 
saw the crisis in both struggles. 
Familiar Names 
The borderland between the Latin culture and the Ger- 
manic dialects, the levels of Flanders and their boundary hills 
of the Artois reappeared, and the same names grew familiar 
which had been familiar in fifty earlier wars: Cambrai, St. 
Ouentin (where, when Spain was so powerful, the struggle 
between I'Vance and the power possessing the Netherla'nds 
was finally decided) ; St. Omer, Cassell, Dunkirk. The 
beginning of the retreat from Mons crossed the field of Mal- 
plaquet and the name of La Bassee ajipeared again in de- 
fensive warfare after 200 j-ears ; while the right of that 
movement was very near the point where the Republic had 
saved Maubeuge 120 years before in the Battle of VVattignies, 
the parent of all the Revolutionary victories. It lay also 
very near to the famous Camp, the quadrilateral of' which 
you can still trace — the camp drawn by Ctesar on the dav 
when he defeated the Nervii, " when it was seen what tlic 
discipline of the Roman people could do." 
In the east of Europe, there was, at the very outset of the 
war. a coincidence even more remarkable than any in the 
West ; and one, perhaps, more diflicult to account for. I 
mean the coincidence of Tannenberg. Tannenbcrg gives its 
name to the great victory in which the Poles destroyed the 
political power of the Teutonic Knights and reached their 
natural limits, the Baltic. The same place gives its name 
10 the one really " clean " tactical success of this war : 
the envelopment and destruction of a whole Russian Army 
by Hindenburg in the late summer of 1914. It would require 
a much greater knowledge of the Masurian district than I 
possess to discover why, under circumstances so different 
and with approaches from points so \-arving, Tannenberg 
should in each case have been the place "of decision. For 
the coincidence must have struck everyone and it must pre- 
sumably have some geographical reason behind it. 
On the southern end of the eastern line aU the necessary 
sites reappear because one is there constrained by great rivers 
and high mountains. The stronghold of Letnberg covering 
the Carpathians approaches reappears ; the Mora\-ian Gate 
behind Cracow is again threatened from the cast ; tlie two 
great passes of invasion into Hungary are attempted but not 
passed, the Dukla and the Magyar. Further south still the 
great trencii of the Vardar is the a. \is whereby the offensive 
from the north and the defensive from the' south operate 
in the Balkans, as it was the axis in Roman times, the one 
necessary road from north to south. 
The capital importance of the Narrows, wiiicli unite 
the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, reappears also in an 
unexpected degree of intensity. To get the alliance of 
Constantinople, to have a cle?r road to Cons'antinopl.', 
through the Bulgarian Alliance, to make of Constantinople 
the bridge, as it were, permitting the extension of operation.s 
into Asia— all these were but the reappearance of the 
Byzantine nodal point in the strategy of our enemy, and the 
Dardanelles expedition was but the reappearance of the same 
point in the strategy of the AUies. Salonika again becomes 
/.he necessary port of the Western /Egean ; again, there 
appears the attack on F'gypt from the north-east. Lastly, 
and astonishingly parallel to history thousands of years old, 
come the lines of advance upon Palestine from the south. 
All the elements are there. Gaza with its torrent bed to tlio 
south ; the first stronghold, the point of contact, after tlie 
delay and handicap of the desert has been crossed. The first 
considerable natural water supply at Beersheba ; the advance 
up the plains before the mountains on the right can be 
attacked ; the sweeping round upon Jerusalem from the west. 
It remains to be seen whether the campaign will produce the 
further parallels of a crossing from Philistia to the E^sdra- 
elon plain, and of a nortliern advance which the mass of 
Lebanon deflects towards Damascus. 
Notable Differences 
When we look to the changes that have taken place in the 
main avenues and nodal points of warfare, we find that 
they have become by this time, after more than three years 
of a modern universal war, quite as. striking as the similarities 
with the past. 
Thus, after noting the extraordinarily close parallel between 
the advance upon Palestine and every other campaign from 
the south upon that country, we cannot but remark the 
complete contrast between the Mesopotaniian campaign of 
the last two years and e\-ery other recorded eh'ort in the sanii 
region. 
The Mesopotaniian campaigns have been in this war an 
advance up stream, through country that could not supply 
a great army. The offensive has been based upon the Persian 
Gulf ; it is the defensive which has been based upon the 
Upper Tigris, the Lippcr Euphrates and the connections with 
Syria and with Asia Minor. 
In the past there have never been more than three main 
schemes of warfare in this region, and these have been either 
of an advance down on to Mesopotamia from the uplands of 
the south-west, west, north-west or from the Persian moun- 
tains ; or of an advance from Mesopotamia outwards in the 
opposite sense. Neither the Babylon of extreme antiquity 
nor the Bagdad of the Dark Ages was threatened from tlic 
Persian Gulf. What has madi the difference here is th- 
possession of Asiatic dominion by a European Power : w hicli 
is a modern thing. That, coupled with steam, has mad- 
the present successful offensive in Mestopotamia possible. 
The same quite modern conditions of Western dominion 
over the East have given us the cut across the Isthmus of Suez 
and have made Egypt strategically a totally different pro- 
position from what it was before Napoleon the Third's reign 
and the last years preceding the great modern rise of Prussia 
in Europe. Egypt, including the Isthmus of Suez has now 
become one of the great nodal points of the world. As surely 
as we live a struggle of the near future, economic and poUtical 
if not mihtary (almost certainly mihtary as welH, will be the 
struggle lor that nodal point. 
Here I might usefully digress upon the shortsightedness of 
those who believe that a negotiated peace would leave this 
country— of all others !— where it was before the outbreak 
of the war. The hold of Great Britain upon that neck of 
land IS something which a mere child looking at the 
globe can see to be dependent upon abnormal power. It 
depends on a distant, isolated effort which almost compels 
challenge. The Egyptian border is the door between the 
\\ est and the East. Yet the keys of that door are in the 
hands of men living— that is having their being and tradition, 
their final affections and their homes— upon the edges of the 
Atlantic and right up in the north at that ! 
Nothing can sa^ .such a position from challenge on tlic 
part of an unbeaten rival save the dissolution either of the 
possessor or of the claimant or both. 
I know that there are some so academic and liAing so much 
in an unreal world that they will believe or hope the future 
to be international." They conceive that the peculiar 
soul and character of " England," " Prussia," " France " 
and the rest will rapidly dissolve under the present strain as 
reiigions have weakened (sometimes) after the great Religious 
Wars of the past. They arc only ideas, and when the ideal 
weakens the value stands for nothing. It is not conceivable, 
rhesc national differences arc too rooted below and too rer- 
meating around for any such dissolution within a ve v luig 
space of time Tl ,t is not we that hold the Egvptian Isiimut 
