Notwithstanding the decisive importance of the moral factor, we must not fail to appreciate the great significance of technical science in the present War as regards the effectiveness of weapons, protection against these weapons, organisation of transport and intelligence services, and also aërial warfare. It could not reveal itself fully until this War. In peace we had rather suspected than actually realised it, for any testing of it on a large scale, let alone on such an enormous scale as the World War has witnessed, was out of the question. The Russo-Japanese War did not reveal it to anything like the same extent; hence the instruction which that war furnished could give but a feeble conception of what might be expected in the sphere of technical science. Moreover, in the decade following upon the Manchurian campaign, technical science underwent an increasingly rapid development. The importance of railways as an instrument of war was early recognised by Moltke. He always kept an eye on their development. Up to the beginning of the World War, the mobilisation of the German forces by rail in 1870 was looked upon as a phenomenal achievement, and rightly so, when we consider the very meagre development of our railway system at that date. Nevertheless, at that time less than half a million Germans had to be dispatched to the frontier, as compared with something like one-and-a-half millions in the year 1914. Also the transports within the Empire after the mobilisation were more than three times as numerous as those of 1870. Moreover, the transfers of troops during the operations themselves, which in 1870-71 took place on both sides in France, appear insignificant by the side of those effected during the World War. In the separate theatres of war movements of transports have been constantly effected, and at the same time the railways have been utilised for manœuvring purposes. The one-time notion which attributed a certain rigidity to railways as compared with progress on foot, because the latter could be deflected at a moment's notice in any desired direction, has now lost much of its force. In spite of the rigidity of the railway tracks, we have always contrived to dispatch the transports in accordance with the requirements of the military command. Whole armies have been transferred from one theatre of war to another, as was essential for the Central Powers in a war conducted on several fronts. Previous wars have, of course, from time to time, furnished instances of a similar utilisation of railways, for instance the American Civil War, and the War of 1866, in which strong contingents of the Austrian Southern Army were dispatched over the Alps to the Danube and back again to the north of Italy. When in 1866, after Königgrätz, we were threatened with the intervention of France, Moltke contemplated the transport of the Prussian troops in Moravia to the Rhine. Nevertheless, as regards