considered worthless and impracticable.

But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and French frontiers had been
properly prepared--as they should have been prepared when the Germans
built their strategic railways--with trenches and gun emplacements and
secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty
miles into either France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liége
and in the Ardennes. Five hundred thousand men would have held them
indefinitely. But the Allies had never worked trench warfare; they were
unready for it, Germans knew of their unreadiness, and their unreadiness
it is quite clear they calculated. They did not reckon, it is now clear
that they were right in not reckoning, the Allies as contemporary
soldiers. They were going to fight a 1900 army with a 1914 army, and
their whole opening scheme was based on the conviction that the Allies
would not entrench.

Somebody in those marvellous maxims from the dark ages that seem to form
the chief reading of our military experts, said that the army that
entrenches is a defeated army. The silly dictum was repeated and
repeated in the English papers after the battle of the Marne. It shows
just where our military science had reached in 1914, namely, to a level
a year before Bloch wrote. So the Allies retreated.

For long weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of Belgium, out of
the north of France, and for rather over a month there was a loose
mobile war--as if Bloch had never existed. The Germans were not fighting
the 1914 pattern of war, they were fighting the 1899 pattern of war, in
which direct attack, outflanking and so on were still supposed to be
possible; they were fighting confident in their overwhelming numbers, in
their prepared surprise, in the unthought-out methods of their