“Of course, we must have an army, a large army.”
“But why?” I said again.
“How else can you--can you defend the honour of your country?”
“The Navy.”
“The Navy! Pooh! The Navy isn’t a weapon of attack; it’s a weapon of defence.”
“But you said ‘defend’.”
“Attack,” put in the Major oracularly, “is the best defence.”
“Exactly.”
I hinted at the possibilities of blockade. The Colonel was scornful. “Sitting down under an insult for months and months,” he called it, until you starved the enemy into surrender. He wanted something much more picturesque, more immediately effective than that. (Something, presumably, more like the Somme.)
“But give me an example,” I said, “of what you mean by ‘insults’ and ‘honour’.”