December 12, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
5 
The foot of the L was a portion of the southern Germanics. 
You see it lying west of Bohemia. It is in the main Bavaria, 
but it includes Baden and Wurtemberg and portions of other 
States. Had the fluctuating and chaotic German-speaking 
communities ever been able to form a State — a task of which 
they have proved themselves incapable after two thousand 
years of effort — we should have had to include in this southern 
portion the Germans of the Upper Danube to a little beyond 
Vienna and the German-speaking peoples of the Alps, both 
what were once called Austrian and what are still called 
Swiss. For the purpose of our modern political moment 
we have only to consider the half isolated limb south of the 
latitude of Frankfort and down to the trontiers of the Tyrol 
and of Switzerland most of which is Bavarian. 
Now it is clear, merely from looking at this map, apart 
from our knowledge, that most of the wealth, nearly all of 
the industrial effort, and certainly all the political direction, 
came from the main northern limb. It is clear, I say, that 
even if the lull territory of this ephemeral modem German 
Empire had been equal in political value the essential thing 
for a victorious enemy desiring to control it would be the 
gates of the northern portion. Hold everything north of the 
great bend of the Rhine at Mayence, and you hold everything 
that is important. Any attack from the south against such 
a victorious enemy would be strategically impossible. By 
the mere holding of the Rhine from Mayence northwards 
you hold the Germanics. This was true even when Bohemia 
was a subject State. It is doubly true now that Bohemia is 
independent. Further, it is north of Mayence — or, at any 
rate, north of Mannheim — that the Rhine becomes a formid- 
able obstacle. As you go up the river from Mannheim 
navigation becomes more difficult, the width — and, still 
more, the depth — less formidable ; but in saying this I am 
saying a thing subject to a great deal of quahfication, for it 
is clear that the Rhine is stiU a very formidable obstacle in 
its upper reaches right to Basle and beyond, although it is 
not what it is in the central and lower reaches. The real 
strategical point of the arrangements is not that the Rhine 
above Mayence or Mannheim is negligible, but that an attack 
under modem circumstances along that sector is negligible. 
To the obvious geographical importance of the Lower 
Rliine at Mayence, Coblenz, and Cologne there is added, 
under modem circumstances, an industrial importance. 
s 
CENTRES OF INDUSTRY 
There were during this great war three great ccHtres of 
industrial effort,, three great centres from which munitions 
and the supply of the German Armies proceeded. Chief of these 
was, of course, the Black Country of the now defunct German 
Empire, tlje coal-field of the Ruhr Valley and its neighbour- 
hood, the centre of which was Essen. It was pointed out 
long ago in these columns — as long ago, I think, as 1914- — ■ 
that one of the great weaknesses of the Prussian combination, 
which was called during the forty odd ycais of its existence 
the German Empire, was the tact that its vitals lay on its 
fronti^s 
The district essentia! Ic the industrial life of that political 
combination more essential than any othei district by far, 
was this great field of industry and misery, between Dortmund 
and Crefeld, between Essen and Solingen. There were also 
the Skodra works near Bohemia and there was the industrial 
f cid of Silesia, far away to the east. 
Now, the possession of Cologne and the brtr^^c-hedd beyond 
paralyses, for purposes of war, the main inc'ustrial district 
upon which the Prussianised German Empire depended. 
Silesia is very far away, and is even now a battle-field 
between the remnants of the German garrisons and the Poles. 
Skodra, iji Bohemia, is eliminated from the problem. The 
possession of the Lower Rhine, therefore, and of its crossings, 
quite apart from the obvious advantage geographically of 
the north of Germany over the south, has this special indus- 
trial advantage at the present moment. 
But there is more than this. The three Rhine crossings 
command all the avenues of approach to Northern Germany 
— that is, to the only Germany which counts in the careful plot 
of yesterday and in the attempted recovery of to-morrow. 
To show why this is so, let us consider the geographical 
and historical conditions of these three points. 
STRATEGICAL IMPORTANCE OF COLOGNE 
Cologne came into existence through no geographical 
necessity. It was an outpost of the Roman Empire upon 
the Rhine, which was founded simply because it was the 
nearest point upon the Rhine to communities already flourish- 
ing in the Roman Empire to the west of it. The main crossing 
of the Meuse established by the Romans was at Maastricht, 
the name of which town is but a peasant provincial corruption 
of the Roman term for the "Meuse crossing" or t eject un\ 
Close by was Aix — that is, Aqute, the waters : One of those 
medicinal springs which so often formed civil centres in the 
Roman Empire. It was a great Roman establishment, and 
became in due course the chief palace of Charlemagne. 
Cologne rose under the Romans because a small settlement 
may have been established there from the confluence of 
local streams with the Rliine, and through the presence of 
an open plain wliich they found was the nearest point 
upon the great river to the Roman crossings of the Meuse 
and of the Roman watering-place of Aix. 
Again, if you are going into the Northern Germanics your 
road must avoid the Ardennes with their profound valleys, 
uninhabited territories, and dense woods, and naturally 
proceed along the Meuse Valley. When you get to the great 
bend of*thc Meuse at Liege your shortest road to the Rhine 
is directly eastward, with a httle north in it, through Aix to 
Cologne. That is how Cologne came into being and became 
the centre, which it has remained for two thousand 
years. 
But Cologne has not only this meaning from the west. 
It has also a meaning towards the east. It wj\s from Cologne 
that the^'great road went up eastward through Paderborn to 
the main crossing of the Elbe at Magdeburg, and the roads 
over the northem heaths to the Baltic and North Sea ports, 
to Hamburg, and to Bremen, the roads to the chief cities 
which arose in the northern flats, the roads to Miinster, to 
Hanover, to Bmnswick, all ultimately converged upon 
Cologne. When the modern system of roads and, what 
is more important to our purpose, of railways arose, 
Cologne acquired a capital importance. It was the great 
bridge of the Lower Rhine. There it is that you will find 
the modern railway crossing in its fullest development. 
There goes the international trunk line of Northern Europe 
across the Rhine, and from that junction branch out all the 
various railroads that take a m&n, once he is across the river, 
not only to Berlin, but to Liege, to Hanover, to Hamburg, 
to Bremen, and the rest. 
Coblenz came into existence in a fashion less political 
and more directly geographical than Cologne. Coblenz is a 
peasant or barbaric corraption of the Latin confluen.ia, a 
term you find in every fomi through Western Europe, 
especially in the French form of C on fans, wherever consider- 
able navigable streams meet, and Coblenz is the place where 
the Moselle and all its traffic comes into the valley of 
the Rhine. 
It is not only the place where the Moselle comes in, forming 
a nodal point of the highest importance and commanding 
the main avenue of advance south-westward into Gaul, it is 
also the point where the Lahn comes in from the eas : a 
German stream which represents no very considerable wealth, 
nor any very great countryside, but, at any rate, stands for 
a whcile county which has to tnake Coblenz its market and 
its meeting-place. A force holding Cologne, but not Coblenz, 
would still command the entrance into the Northern Ger- 
manics, not separate from, but complementary to, and 
^different from the holding of Cologne and of Coblenz: for 
Cologne and Coblenz aie | places from whence attack may 
be checked. 
