Both these conditions have been present in Europe as a whole, and particularly in Western Europe, during our generation, and that is why this war has already taught so many lessons to those who study military and naval affairs, and why already it has settled so many disputed points.
Manœuvres could tell one much, but there was always absent from them the prime factor of fear, and that next factor almost as important, of actual destruction.
The list of questions, detailed and general, which have already been wholly or partly answered by the present campaigns might be indefinitely extended. There are hundreds of them. But if we consider only the principal ones we shall find that they fall roughly into two main categories. You have the technical questions of armament, its use and its effect; formation, and so forth; and you have the political questions.
The first set are concerned with the action of human beings under particular forms of danger, and the physical effect of the weapons they will employ under the conditions of a high civilization.
The second set are concerned with the action of human beings as citizens, not as soldiers. How they will face the advent of war, whether national feeling will be stronger than class feeling, whether secrecy can be preserved, and the rest.
A list of the principal points in each of these sets will run somewhat as follows:
In the first there were opposing schools as to—
(1) The value of modern permanent fortification and its power of resistance to a modern siege train.
(2) The best formation in which to organize troops for action, and particularly the quarrel between close formation and open.
(3) The doubts as to the degree of reliance which could be placed upon air-scouts, their capacity for engaging one another, the qualities that would give dominion of the air, and in particular the value of the great modern dirigible balloons.