"You might then say," said I, "that those who fortify to-day are foolish; and, for that matter, you might add that those who have fortified in the past were foolish. For since each in turn is proved to be wrong with regard to the future, each generation might have spared itself this enormous labour."
"You are right when you call it enormous labour," said he, "but you are wrong when you say that it was ever futile. What a labour it is only those know who have looked closely into and meditated upon the fortifications of the past. The chalk hills and ramparts thrown up upon them by men perhaps who could use no spade and who depended for carriage upon baskets, which we to-day, when we estimate them in a modern method, reckon in fantastic sums of money; and this was done to defend, we know not what, by men every record of whom has perished. The ancient walls of the cities are much the largest and the strongest buildings they can boast, and much the most enduring. The transformation of a city two hundred years ago and more, when hardly a frontier place of Europe but had its elaborate system of main and out works, proves the same labour. Consider little Bayonne, never other than a little town, and yet flanked with a work which must have meant more than the building of a modern railway. And then, lastly, consider to-day the great garrisons circled with forts: Spezia and Metz, and the French frontier garrisons, and Antwerp and the line of the Meuse. And even, at the far ends of the world, Port Arthur, which, though it was never finished, was to have been among the greatest of all. Yes, it is a toil if you like, and that is why those who court defeat by boasting shirk it or ridicule it."
"But they are right to ridicule it," said I, "since time itself ridicules the walls of a city, and since it can be shown that no city has been made impregnable."
"You use a false argument," he insisted; "it is as though you were to say that because all men die therefore no man should live. These trenches and these walls and these circles of isolated forts to-day procure for men who fight under their shoulder a draft upon Time. That is what fortification is, and that is why all who have ever understood the art of war have fortified; and all who, upon the contrary, have in one way or another failed to understand the art of war, whether because they secretly desired to avoid arms or whether because they believed themselves invincible (which is the most unmilitary mood in the world!) have failed to fortify."
"I have heard it said," I answered him, "in the schools where such things are taught, that the Romans, as they were the chief masters of war, were also the most plodding in the use of the spade, and that not only would they fortify permanently every military post, but that they cast up a square fieldwork round them every night, wherever the army rested."
The little spare old gunner shrugged his shoulders. "They would have found it awkward," he said, "to do that in the case of a single battery quartered during manœuvres in a country house. But in general you are right: the Romans, who were the great masters of the art of war, thought of the spade and of the sword as of twin brothers, only the sword was the more noble, and in a fashion the elder of the two. At any rate, certainly those who are in the tradition of the Romans perpetually fortify...." Then he asked me abruptly: "Since you are a foreigner and since you say that you have travelled (for I had told him of my travels when we made acquaintance), have you not noticed that wherever men are boastful or inept they despise fortifications, and that it is absent, and that the bases of their military action, their depots, their political centres, their harbours and dockyards lie open?"
"I cannot tell," I answered, "for I have no knowledge of such things."
"Well, you find it is so," he said, and he walked away. He was much ruder and more long-winded than if he had been in the Cavalry, but you cannot have everything at once.