orts and
destroy the French naval depots. It would be a war to the knife with
France, one which would, if victorious, annihilate once for all the
French position as a Great Power. If France, with her falling
birth-rate, determines on such a war, it is at the risk of losing her
place in the first rank of European nations, and sinking into permanent
political subservience. Those are the stakes.

The participation of Russia in the naval war must also be contemplated.
That is the less dangerous, since the Russian Baltic fleet is at present
still weak, and cannot combine so easily as the English with the French.
We could operate against it on the inner line--i.e., we could use the
opportunity of uniting rapidly our vessels in the Baltic by means of the
Kaiser-Wilhelm Canal; we could attack the Russian ships in vastly
superior force, and, having struck our blow, we could return to the
North Sea. For these operations it is of the first importance that the
Danish straits should not be occupied by the enemy. If they fell into
the hands of the English, all free operations in the Baltic would be
almost impossible, and our Baltic coast would then be abandoned to the
passive protection of our coast batteries.

CHAPTER IX

THE CRUCIAL QUESTION

I have examined the probable conditions of the next naval war in some
detail, because I thought that our general political and military
position can only be properly estimated by considering the various
phases of the war by sea and by land, and by realizing the possibilities
and dangers arising from the combined action of the hostile forces on
our coasts and land frontiers. In this way only can the direction be
decided in which our preparations for war ought to move.

The considerations, then, to which the discussion about the naval war
with England and her probable allies gave rise have shown that we shall
need to make very great exertions to protect ourselves successfully from
a hostile attack by sea. They also proved that we cannot count on an
ultimate victory at sea unless we are victorious on land. If an
Anglo-French army invaded North Germany through Holland, and threatened
our coast defences in the rear, it would soon paralyze our defence by
sea. The same argument applies to the eastern theatre. If Russian armies
advance victoriously along the Baltic and co-operate with a combined
fleet of our opponents, any continuation of the naval war would be
rendered futile by the o