[Illustration: Sketch 12.]

If wastage compels him to shorten his defensive line upon the left, he
is in a similar quandary between 1 and 3.

The whole situation is one in which he is quite certain that a
defensive war, long before he is pushed to extremities, will compel
him to "scrap" one of the four corners, yet each one is, for some
political reason, especially dear to him and even perhaps necessary to
him. Each he desires, with alternating anxieties and indecisions, to
preserve at all costs from invasion; yet he cannot, as he is forced
upon the defensive, preserve all four.

Here, again, the ideal situation for him would be to possess against
the invader some such arrangement as is suggested by Sketch 11. In
this arrangement, if one were compelled unfortunately to consider four
special districts as more important than the mass of one's territory,
one would have the advantage of knowing that they were clearly
distinguishable into less and more important, and the further
advantage of knowing that the more important the territory was, the
more central it was and the better protected against invasion.

Thus, in this diagram, the government of the general oblong, A, may
distinguish four special zones, the protection of which from invasion
is important, but which vary in the degree of their importance. The
least important is the outermost, 1; the more important is an inner
one, 2; still more important is 3; and most important of all is the
black core of the whole.

Some such arrangement has been the salvation of France time and time