l position.

The first was, that he was not wholly free to act, as, for instance, Caesar
in Gaul was free, or Napoleon after 1799. He must perpetually arrange
matters, in the first stages with the Dutch commissioner, later with the
imperial general, Prince Louis of Baden, who was his equal in command. He
must persuade and even trick certain of his allies in all the first steps
of the great business; he must accommodate himself to others throughout
the whole of it.

Secondly, the direction in which he took himself separated him from the
possibility of rapidly communicating his designs, his necessities, his
chances, or his perils to what may be called his _moral_ base. This moral
base, the seat both of his own Government and of the Dutch (his principal
concern), lay, of course, near the North Sea, and under the immediate
supervision of England and the Hague. This is a point which the modern
reader may be inclined to ridicule until he remembers under what
conditions the shortest message, let alone detailed plans and the
execution of considerable orders, could alone be performed two hundred
years ago. By a few bad roads, across a veritable dissected map of little
independent or quasi-independent polities, each with its own frontier and
prejudices and independent government, the messenger (often a single
messenger) must pass through a space of time equivalent to the passage of
a continent to-day, and through risks and difficulties such as would
to-day be wholly eliminated by the telegraph. The messenger was further
encumbered by every sort of change from town to town, in local opinion,
and the opportunities for aid.

More than this, in marching to the Danube, Marlborough was putting between
himself and that upon which he morally, and most of all upon which he
physically, relied, a barrier of difficult mountain land.

Having mentioned this barrier, it is the place for me to describe the
physical conditions of that piece of strategy, and I will beg the reader
to pay particular attention to the accompanying map, and to read what
follows closely in connection with it.

In all war, strategy considers routes, and routes are determined by
obstacles.

Had the world one flat and uniform surface, the main problems of strategy
would not exist.

The surface of the world is diversified by certain features--rivers,
chains of hills, deserts, marshes, seas, etc.--the passage across which
presents difficulties peculiar to an army, an