The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great WarBelloc, Hilaire
History
The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great War
Belloc, Hilaire
Europe -- Politics and government; Military art and science; World War, 1914-1918
The list of questions, detailed and general, which have already
been wholly or partly answered by the present campaigns might be
indefinitely extended. There are hundreds of them. But if we consider
only the principal ones we shall find that they fall roughly into
two main categories. You have the technical questions of armament,
its use and its effect; formation, and so forth; and you have the
political questions.
The first set are concerned with the action of human beings under
particular forms of danger, and the physical effect of the weapons
they will employ under the conditions of a high civilization.
The second set are concerned with the action of human beings as
citizens, not as soldiers. How they will face the advent of war,
whether national feeling will be stronger than class feeling, whether
secrecy can be preserved, and the rest.
A list of the principal points in each of these sets will run
somewhat as follows:
In the first there were opposing schools as to--
(1) The value of modern permanent fortification and its power of
resistance to a modern siege train.
(2) The best formation in which to organize troops for action, and
particularly the quarrel between close formation and open.
(3) The doubts as to the degree of reliance which could be placed
upon air-scouts, their capacity for engaging one another, the
qualities that would give dominion of the air, and in particular the
value of the great modern dirigible balloons.
(4) The effect, method, and proportionate value of rifle fire and of
the bayonet.
(5) The use of field artillery; and particularly whether, after a
certain degree of rapidity, still greater rapidity of fire was worth
having.
(6) The exact _rôle_ that would be played in modern war by the supply
of certain materials hitherto unimportant and discoverable only
in certain limited regions, most of them out of Europe. There are
a great number of these materials, but much the most important is
petrol.
(7) Lastly, and by far the most vital of purely technical questions
to this country, was the solution of certain opposing theories upon
what is rather rhetorically called “the command of the sea” and what
might more justly be called naval superiority.
In the second set, the political questions, the most important were:
(1) The working of the conscript and of the voluntary systems.
(2) The possibility of preserving secrecy.
(3) Whether mobilization would work smoothly or not in the face of
class struggles supposedly formidable to national interests.
(4) The action of our modern town populations under the moral strain
of war.
LESSONS WE HAVE LEARNT
Not all of the questions, military or political, have as yet been
solved by experience. Many of them are, however, already partially
solved, some wholly solved. And we may consider them usefully one by
one.
(1) The value of permanent fortification.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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