its military force Germany will take the initiative of operations
and will make the war on the two fronts."

His prophetic eye saw even the submarine war of the future. "It
will happen, possibly, that the future war will produce engines
of war completely unknown and unexpected up to the present time;
in any event one can foresee the advent in a short time of
submarines destined to carry below even ironclads, torpedoes
powerful enough to wreck the strongest ships."

He quotes the opinions of Jomini, who says that future armies
will not be composed of troops recruited voluntarily but of
entire nations called by a law to arms and who will not fight for
a change of frontier but for their existence. Jomini states "that
this state of affairs will bring us back to the third and the
fourth centuries, calling to our minds those shocks of immense
peoples who disputed among themselves the European continent,"
and "that if a new legislation and a new international law do not
come to put an end to these risings of whole peoples that it is
impossible to foresee where the ravages of future war will stop.
It will become a scourge more terrible than ever, because the
population of civilised nations will be cut down, while in the
interior of each nation the normal economic life will be
arrested, communications interrupted and if the war is prolonged
financial crises will come with a fearful rise in the price of
everything and famine with all its consequences."

Bloch, in depicting the future war, says that "in 1870, the
struggle was between two Powers, while in the war of the future
at least five great nations will take part without speaking of
the intervention of Turkey and England.... The comparing of the
coming war with any war of the past is impossible because the
increase in the effective fighting forces has been of a rapidity
so unexampled and this increase brings with it so great an
augmentation of expenditures and of victims that the future war
will have the character of a struggle for the existence of
nations.... It is true that the war of 1870 gave us something of
an example of this character. That was a war without mercy,
brought on by secular hate, a war of revenge on the part of the
Germans because of the ancient victories of the French, a war
where volunteers were shot and villages burned and where unheard
of exactions were imposed on the conquered whom the conqueror
sought to wrong and weaken for a long period of ti