This type of contingency was not one we planned for.
Bernstorff was bound by treaty to assist Russia in such a contingency, but he took care that the assistance so rendered should be as trifling as possible, to avoid offending Great Britain and Prussia.
The British admiral, when informed that the French were at sea, justified Napoleon's estimate of his probable course in such a contingency, by making a useless cruise to Egypt.
This contingency had been studied, and preparations for a new line had begun, during the Austrian offensive in 1916, and Cadorna had ordered the work to be continued during the interval.
And though the Stoic doctrine of determinism did not, when applied to moral problems, advance much beyond the reiteration of arguments derived from the universal validity of the principles of causality, nor the Epicurean counter-assertion of freedom avoid the error of regarding chance as a real cause and universal contingency as an explanation of the universe, it was nevertheless a real step forward to perceive the existence of the problem.
