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In 1914 the Germans outflanked the obstructive cuestas by slipping into the Paris Basin from the Flanders Plain, where the stony outcroppings tend to disappear. This Flanders Plain is an extension of the Baltic Plain that runs all the way from the North Sea to Russia. There Winston Churchill's great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, won his victories of Ramillies (1706) and Malplaquet (1709). There the French under the great Marshal Saxe defeated the British and the Dutch at Fontenoy in 1745. There Waterloo was fought and Napoleon finally defeated in 1815. The Flanders Plain is protected to the East by the Belgian hills and fortresses of Liege and Namur. It is protected to the northeast by Belgium's new Albert Canal, built as much for defense as for commerce, and beyond that by low-lying Dutch country that can be flooded if necessary. But even with fortresses and canals and emergency breaches in the dikes, the Flanders Plain offers the least difficult road to Paris and the French channel ports. It is a road that should be captured in summer. Flanders mud is a potent delayer during the sloppy months of the West European winter. The Belgians hope they can remain neutral in the next war, and King Leopold is a strong neutralite. But practically Belgium must ally itself with the enemy of its first invader.
Bloody Plains. Germany contains two major theatres of war although for more than a hundred years no big war has been fought on German soil. In 1914 this was due to German possession of Alsace and Lorraine, which kept the French from pouring through the Lorraine Gateway and the Belfort gap. In 1870, when the French owned the border provinces, the stupidity of Marshal Bazaine, who shut himself up in the fortress of Metz and refused to stir, deprived France of the opportunity to push into the South German Basin.
General Gamelin knows all about Bazaine's blunder and he knows also the history of the first Napoleon, who never made such mistakes. Napoleon frequently carried his eagles through the Black Forest into southern Germany. Ulm, Ratisbon and Hohenlinden in the South German Basin were all sites of Napoleonic victories against the various coalitions of Austria, Russia and England. A few miles from Ulm, at Blenheim, the Duke of Marlborough won his "famous Victory" in 1704—the victory over the French that so nonplussed the grandfather of Little Peterkin in Robert Southey's poem. To prevent a new war from being carried into the South German Basin or to the western end of the Baltic Plain the Nazis have built the Siegfried—or Limes—line. At its vital segment (between the Lorraine Gateway and Luxemburg) where the French might penetrate into the German concentration areas on the Rhine, this "line" is not a mere chain of forts, but a network organized in depth. A year ago the French might have crossed the Rhine; now the chances for carrying the war into Germany are not so good. Nevertheless, Gamelin is maybe game for the try.
Opposite the corner of the South German Basin which is entered by the Belfort gap lies the Moravian Gateway (where Napoleon fought Austerlitz in 1805) and the Moravian Gate leads to the Baltic Plain, to Breslau, Warsaw and Danzig (which Napoleon entered in 1807).