Fortification

Excerpt from Fortification: Its Past Achievements, Recent Development, and Future Progress

The number of works on Fortification in the English language is small. The sumptuous volumes which annually appear in Paris and Brussels have no counterpart here. The keen discussion, which the subject excites in France and Germany, wakes but a faint echo on this side of the Channel, and an explanation of this marked difference can easily be suggested. Land defence in the British Empire is, perhaps, not seriously regarded, notwithstanding that we have expended large sums upon it. The North-West Frontier is far distant, and its protection may possibly be looked upon as a matter for the Government of India, not for us at home. Coast defence must apparently claim consideration, if only for the purpose of correctly adjusting its scale to the real needs of the Empire. But such things are probably assumed to be exhaustively discussed by experts with whom the uninitiated may not intermeddle. It results that there is no school of thought in regard to Fortification; that elementary principles are still floating in solution; and that no approach to a consensus of matured opinion is ever attained.

Of mere text-books there are enough; but such works are apt to be swamped in the dreary morass of technicality.

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