D.—Drawbacks and Disadvantages
While, notwithstanding the conditions to be observed and the limitations to be experienced, the balance of advantage conferred by railways on the conduct of war may appear so pronounced, from a military and a political point of view, there is a darker side to the story, as regards the world at large, which must also be taken into account.
If railways have increased the power of defending a country against invasion they have, also, increased enormously the power of aggression at the command of an invader.
They offer vastly greater facilities to military Powers for the making of sudden attacks on neighbouring countries—themselves, it may be, in a state of more or less unpreparedness.
They afford the opportunity for overwhelming weaker Powers by means of armies mobilised and concentrated in the interior and poured on to or across the frontier in an endless succession of trains following one another with such rapidity that the initial movement may, in some instances, be carried out within the short space of twenty-four hours.
They permit of the prosecution of war at distances which, but for the means offered for military transport by rail, would render war impracticable.
They allow of war being carried on between a number of nations at one and the same time, thus spreading the area over which the conflicts of to-day may extend.
They encourage the cherishing of designs of world-power and dreams of universal conquest.
They have added to the horrors of war by facilitating the transport and the employment of the most terrible engines of war.
They have rendered possible the carrying off of plunder from an occupied territory to an extent which would be impossible if the invaders had to depend on ordinary road vehicles for their means of transport.
They have brought fresh risks and dangers upon civil populations, the maintenance of lines of rail communication being a matter of such paramount importance to an invader that the severest measures may be adopted by him towards the community in general as a means of terrorising them and ensuring the security of the railway lines.
What, in effect, count as "advantages" in one direction may be the gravest of disadvantages in another.
Such, for attack or for defence, for good or for evil, is the nature, and such are the possibilities, of that rail-power in warfare which, after eighty years of continuous evolution, was, in the War of the Nations imposed on mankind in 1914, to undergo a development and an application on a wider, more impressive, and more terrible scale than the world had ever seen before.