Part Three
FALL
… it is very doubtful whether our ‘traditional’ strategy is workable any longer. In the past it really depended on the balance of power, more and more precarious from 1870 onwards, and on geographical advantages which modern technical developments have lessened. After 1890 Britain was no longer the only naval power, and moreover the whole scope of naval warfare had diminished. With the abandonment of sail navies became less mobile, the inland seas were inaccessible after the invention of the marine mine, and blockade lost part of its power owing to the science of substitutes and the mechanization of agriculture. After the rise of modem Germany it was hardly possible for us to dispense with European alliances, and one of the things allies are apt to insist on is that you do your fair share of the fighting. Money subsidies have no meaning when war involves the total effort of every belligerent nation.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell,
4 vols. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970), ii, p. 284,
from a review of Liddell Hart’s The British Way in Warfare.