In practice, however, as he proceeded to point out, this ideal system could not be fully adopted, partly because the planning of railways is influenced by the configuration of the country, which may not permit of geometrical designs for iron roads; and partly because the trunk lines of national systems of rail communication had already been laid by private enterprise on the principle of catering for the social and economic needs of the community and of returning interest on capital expenditure, rather than of serving military or political purposes.
In the proposals which Pönitz himself advanced for providing Germany with a complete network of strategical lines he sought to combine, as far as possible, the commercial and the military principle; though the subsequent predominance, in most countries, of the economic element in regard to railways in general strengthened the force of his contention that an ideal system was not necessarily a practicable one. The suggested geometrical design was, nevertheless, not lost sight of, and it continued to be regarded as the plan that should, at least, be followed in respect to strategical railways, as far as circumstances would permit.
Dealing with this particular subject in his "Geschichte und System der Eisenbahnbenutzung im Kriege" (Leipzig, 1896), Dr. Josef Joesten included the following among the conditions which, theoretically and practically, should enable a railway system to respond to the necessities of war:—
1. To each of the strategical fronts of the national territory there should be the largest possible number of railway lines, all independent the one of the other.
2. The converging lines terminating at the bases of concentration, and more especially those leading to the coast or to great navigable rivers, should be crossed by numerous transverse lines in order to allow of the rapid passing of troops from any one of the lines of concentration to any other.
3. Positions or localities having a recognised strategical value should be selected as the places where the two types of lines should cross, and these intersection points, when they are near to the frontier, should themselves be protected by fortifications serving as points d'appui for movements of advance or retirement.
It is possible that, if the building of railways in Germany had been left entirely to the State from the outset, these principles would have been generally followed there; but in Prussia the private lines taken over as the result of the policy of nationalisation adopted by that country—the total length of those acquired since 1872 being now nearly 10,000 miles—had been originally constructed to serve, not strategic, but economic purposes, and, more especially, the industrial interests of Westphalia and the Rhineland, the Government having been left by private enterprise to provide, not alone the strategical lines, but, also, the lines that were wanted to serve the less promising economic requirements, of Eastern Prussia. To say, therefore, as some writers have done, that the Prussian—if not the German—railways as a whole have been designed to serve military purposes is erroneous. It is none the less true that the adoption of the principle of State ownership conferred alike on Prussia and on other German States a great advantage in enabling them both to build strategical lines as, ostensibly, part of the ordinary railway system and to adapt existing lines to military purposes so far as conditions allowed and occasion might require.
In these circumstances any close adherence to ideal systems has, indeed, not been practicable; yet the activity shown in Germany in providing either new or adapted strategical lines of railway has been beyond all question.
Such activity has been especially manifest since the Franco-German war of 1870-1. It is, indeed, the case that during the last twenty-five years there have been constant representations by Prussian trading interests that the railways in Westphalia and Rhineland, numerous as they might appear to be, were unequal to the industrial needs of those districts. The reasons for these conditions were that the Administration, eager to secure railway "profits," had neglected to provide adequately for improvements, widenings and extensions of line, and for additions to rolling stock. No one, however, is likely to suggest that Prussia has shown any lack of enterprise in the construction of strategical lines which would enable her to concentrate great masses of troops on her frontiers with the utmost dispatch. "The rivalry between neighbouring States," writes von der Goltz in "The Conduct of War," "has had the effect of causing perfectly new lines to be constructed solely for military reasons. Strategical railways constitute a special feature of our time"; and in no country has this fact been recognised more clearly, and acted upon more thoroughly, than in Germany.
It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to attempt to form a reliable estimate of the situation, from a strategical point of view, on the basis of the ordinary German railway maps, and certain reproductions thereof recently offered in the English Press have been wholly misleading. Not only may these maps be hopelessly out of date—one, for instance, that was published in a military journal in the autumn of 1914 contained none of the strategical lines built by Prussia since 1900 for troop movements in the direction of Belgium—but they invariably draw no distinction between State-owned lines which do come into consideration in regard to military transports and agricultural or other lines—including many narrow-gauge ones—which serve local purposes only and are still owned by private companies, the State not having thought it necessary in the general interest to take them over.