en it came to eject them. They might, for
example, encircle and block some fortified post, and force costly and
disastrous attempts to relieve it. The defensive country would stand at
bay, tethered against any effective counter-blow, keeping guns,
supplies, and men in perpetual and distressing movement to and fro along
its sea-frontiers. Its soldiers would get uncertain rest, irregular
feeding, unhealthy conditions of all sorts in hastily made camps. The
attacking fleet would divide and re-unite, break up and vanish,
amazingly reappear. The longer the defender's coast the more wretched
his lot. Never before in the world's history was the command of the sea
worth what it is now. But the command of the sea is, after all, like
military predominance on land, to be insured only by superiority of
equipment in the hands of a certain type of man, a type of man that it
becomes more and more impossible to improvise, that a country must live
for through many years, and that no country on earth at present can be
said to be doing its best possible to make.

All this elaboration of warfare lengthens the scale between theoretical
efficiency and absolute unpreparedness. There was a time when any tribe
that had men and spears was ready for war, and any tribe that had some
cunning or emotion at command might hope to discount any little
disparity in numbers between itself and its neighbour. Luck and
stubbornness and the incalculable counted for much; it was half the
battle not to know you were beaten, and it is so still. Even to-day, a
great nation, it seems, may still make its army the plaything of its
gentlefolk, abandon important military appointments to feminine
intrigue, and trust cheerfully to the homesickness and essential modesty
of its influential people, and the simpler patriotism of its colonial
dependencies when it comes at last to the bloody and wearisome business
of "muddling through." But these days of the happy-go-lucky optimist are
near their end. War is being drawn into the field of the exact sciences.
Every additional weapon, every new complication of the art of war,
intensifies the need of deliberate preparation, and darkens the outlook
of a nation of amateurs. Warfare in the future, on sea or land alike,
will be much more one-sided than it has ever been in the past, much more
of a foregone conclusion. Save for national lunacy, it will be brought
about by the side that will win, and because that side knows that it
will