a pigeon-hole with the word impracticable written large across it; but to help a timid and easily deceived British public to realise to the full the folly of its fears, we will assume that German naval officers have given their voice in favour of landing on a beach, and do our best to find one suitable to the purpose.
To accommodate 246,000 men, 78,000 horses, 864 guns, 13,200 vehicles, such a beach must be, at least, from 12 to 15 miles long; it should have a firm sandy bottom, plentiful supplies of good water at intervals along its whole length, and it should be in the vicinity of a good-sized town, the larger the better, where fresh food and labour, skilled and unskilled, and the hundred and one things that an army, cut off from its own country, would soon find itself in need of, could be procured, and where the sick and wounded could be properly housed—in a word, a town fitted to serve as a base for
