Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/308

  In 1870 only 250,000 men could be concentrated in a month, while the reserves and garrisons did not, at first, reach 300,000. The position is therefore completely changed; money, work, and time have, in spite of obstacles and incapacities, converted the French army into a machine of power.

For what purpose can this machine be used?

Can it possibly be employed for attacking Germany?

Or is it, by the force of things, utilizable solely and exclusively for defence?

To obtain answers to these questions it is essential to look at them from three different standpoints — to measure the strategical, the material, and the political considerations which seem likely to influence the action of France.

When the Germans took the Alsace-Lorraine fortresses, and surrounded them with additional fortifications, which have rendered them impregnable without a long siege, they thereby rendered it virtually impossible for France to undertake an offensive campaign. The annexation of those fortresses has turned out to mean something more than territorial conquest, something else than homage to a German sentiment; it is now proved to be an act of the profoundest military wisdom. They close the road to Germany.

The experience of recent campaigns, and especially of 1870, has clearly shown, that though an army can advance into hostile territory without immediately investing the fortresses on its way (unless, indeed, they contain a numerous garrison, in which case that garrison must of course be watched by a more than equal force), it is scarcely possible to advance at all — with the masses of men which modern war puts in motion — unless the invader has a railway at his complete disposal for the carriage of his supplies. It happens, however, that the new German strongholds between France and the Rhine would, in consequence of the space covered by their fortifications, be, of necessity, heavily garrisoned in the event of a French attack, and that it would therefore be indispensable to invest them at once. Such an investment would mean the immobilization, for an undetermined period, of a force which can scarcely be estimated at less than 400,000 men. But the loss of the Alsace-Lorraine fortresses means much more than this; it means, also, the total stoppage of all traffic on the railways which pass through and are commanded by those fortresses. Consequently, supposing even that France were able to devote 400,000 men to the merely secondary task of reducing the lateral obstacles in her path — supposing that she had enough men to besiege several first-class fortresses, and to simultaneously conquer all the German armies in the field — she would not, even then, have the command of a single railway until one or more of the fortresses were taken, and would have to contend, meanwhile, against difficulties of transport, which it is impossible to suppose that she could overcome. The holding out for a few weeks of a little place like Toul caused the very gravest difficulties to the Germans in 1870, because it deprived them of the use of the line to Paris, which passed under the guns of that fortress. What would happen then to the French, with their inferior organization, if such an obstacle arose in every direction at the very origin of the campaign, if they had to try to fight their way ahead without a railway? Turn and twist this difficulty as you like, you cannot get over it. There it is, absolute and unchangeable. If, then, we follow up the idea of an attack by France on Germany, we are bound to suppose, first, that all, or nearly all, the 1,300,000 men of the French active army can be brought on to German soil at the very commencement of the campaign; secondly, that the supplies for, say, 800,000 men (no weaker army could be supposed to force a road against united Germany), could be carried regularly to constantly increasing distances in carts.

It is surely needless to pursue such an hypothesis as this.

Yet, all the same, let us go one step further, in order to exhaust the wildest possibilities of the case. Let us conceive (if we are capable of so mad an imagining) that the armies are forthcoming, that all the fortresses are invested, that the Germans are defeated and are driven across the Rhine, and that the French follow them and advance into pure German ground. An offensive war under such conditions, with the prodigious quantities of men which would be employed on both sides, — with all the Fatherland in arms in front, and with all the men of France surging onwards from behind, — would necessitate a vigor of command, a unity of action, a perfection of administration, which would imply not mere ordinary 