ration: Sketch 4.]

When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and when one
goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
quickly beaten.

The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
German Empire, but the German Empire _plus_ the whole of the dominions
governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.

How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
population which are in conflict--that is, the fairly well populated
areas--are more accurately represented by a modification of the map
on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
density of population is represented by the comparative distances
between the parallel cross-lines.

2. The next thing that strikes one is the position of the neutral
countries. Supposing Belgium to have remained neutral, or, rather, to
have allowed German armies to pass over her soil without actively
resisting, the Germanic body would have been free to trade with
neutral countries, and to receive support from their commerce, and to
get goods through them over the whole of their western front, with the
exception of the tiny section which stands for the frontier common to
France and Germany. On the north, supposing the Baltic to be open, the
Germanic body had a vast open frontier of hundreds of miles, and
though Russia closed most of the eastern side, all the Roumanian
frontier was open, and so was the frontier of the Adriatic, right away
from the Italian border to Cattaro. So was the Swiss frontier and the
Italian.

[Illustration: Sketch 5.]

Indeed, if we draw the Germanic body by itself surro