n or
Moscow, is to be dismissed altogether from our calculations. The end of
this war will be a matter of negotiation between practically immobilised
and extremely shattered antagonists.

There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch deadlock that the Germans
at least have contemplated. If it is not possible to get through or
round, it may still be possible to get over. There is the air path.

This idea has certainly taken hold of the French mind, but France has
been too busy and is temperamentally too economical to risk large
expenditures upon what is necessarily an experiment. The British are too
conservative and sceptical to be the pioneers in any such enterprise.
The Russians have been too poor in the necessary resources of mechanics
and material.

The Germans alone have made any sustained attempt to strike through the
air at their enemies beyond the war zone. Their Zeppelin raids upon
England have shown a steadily increasing efficiency, and it is highly
probable that they will be repeated on a much larger scale before the
war is over. Quite possibly, too, the Germans are developing an
accessory force of large aeroplanes to co-operate in such an attack.
The long coasts of Britain, the impossibility of their being fully
equipped throughout their extent, except at a prohibitive cost of men
and material, to resist air invaders, exposes the whole length of the
island to considerable risk and annoyance from such an expedition.

It is doubtful, though, if the utmost damage an air raid is likely to
inflict upon England would count materially in the exhaustion process,
and the moral effect of these raids has been, and will be, to stiffen
the British resolution to fight this war through to the conclusive
ending of any such possibilities.

The net result of these air raids is an inflexible determination of the
British people rather to die in death grips with German militarism than
to live and let it survive. The best chance for the aircraft was at the
beginning of the war, when a surprise development might have had
astounding results. That chance has gone by. The Germans are racially
inferior to both French and English in the air, and the probability of
effective blows over the deadlock is on the whole a probability in
favour of the Allies. Nor is there anything on or under the sea that
seems likely now to produce decisive results. We return from these
considerations to a strengthened acceptance of Bloch.

The essential