The Spies of Warsaw

As looking at a portrait suggests the impression of the subject’s destiny to the observer, so the map of France tells our own fortune. The body of the country has in its centre a citadel, a forbidding mass of age-old mountains, flanked by the tablelands of Provence, Limousin, and Burgundy; and, all around, vast slopes, for the most part difficult of access to anyone attacking them from the outside and split by the gorges of the Saone, the Rhone, and the Garonne, barred by the walls of the Jura Alps and the Pyrenees or else plunging in the distance into the English Channel, the Atlantic, or the Mediterranean; but in the Northeast, there is a terrible breach between the essential basins of the Seine and the Loire and German territory. The Rhine, which nature meant for the Gauls to have as their boundary and their protection, has hardly touched France before it leaves her and lays her open to attack.

— Captain Charles de Gaulle, The Army of the Future, 1934