It is because the strategists of Berlin have long recognized this conception of modern warfare; it is because they have at their fingers’ ends a documentation of political science, slowly accumulated and of unquestionable worth, that they are in a position to meet endless problems as they present themselves, and to achieve successes against the Allies which, on the surface, appear incomprehensible. As for the leaders of the Allies, it seems as if many of them are not alive to the element of political science in the war, even at the present moment. The reason is simple. The same men who ignored the realities of Pan-Germanism before the war are, naturally enough, unable to grasp the politico-scientific, geographic, economic, ethnographic, and psychological realities of all Europe now that the conflict has burst on us. In the realm of the intellectual there can be no improvisation. To master the politico-scientific elements necessary for the prosecution of this war, there is need of minds trained by the unremitting application of fifteen or twenty years. Among the leaders of the Entente no man is to be found who has bent his will to such intellectual effort; and the pressing problems brought forth by each day give no time for minute, deliberate study by the men who have succeeded to the seats of power since war began. II The capital mistakes in the prosecution of the war committed by the Entente proceed directly from the defective equipment of its leaders which I have just pointed out. They explain the difference in the results obtained by the two groups of belligerents, although the courage and self-sacrifice of the Allies’ soldiers are as great as those of the Germans. They explain, too, why the three hundred millions of the Allies—this takes no account of their colonial resources or of the support drawn from trans-oceanic neutrals—have not yet succeeded in defeating Germany, which entered the war with a population of sixty-eight millions and one ally, Austria-Hungary, of whose thirty million people three quarters were directly antagonistic to Berlin.