What will be tested? Moving troops, carrying arms and stores, organising supply, bringing unlike units under one command. The British will send about three hundred soldiers of the Seventh Brigade, known as the Desert Rats, together with Eurofighter Typhoon fighters and a Voyager aircraft that feeds the others in flight, so that Ukraine's skies, when they reopen, may be made safe for merchants. The Turks will move a fleet from Istanbul and rehearse clearing the Black Sea of mines, so that ships can return to Ukraine's ports. The statements add that these forces will go only once the war is over and at the express request of the Ukrainian government; they will neither keep the peace nor inspect a ceasefire, but will train, advise and strengthen the Ukrainian army.

Mark this one thing, Fathers: only the British declare their strength. What the Spaniards will send, or the Germans, or the French themselves, who have taken the headquarters for their own, the statements do not say, as the source itself admits. When I was sent to Spain, where no one else would go, a private citizen holding command, the first thing I learned was to count what I had. A general who does not count his allies is counting his hopes.

Our ancestors knew this trial. While Hannibal was in Italy, twelve Latin colonies told the consuls they had neither men nor money; the other eighteen declared themselves ready, and through them the republic stood. An alliance rests on contingents, not on speeches. My own Spain, which I once won over by arms and by clemency, is silent here too: how many soldiers it will send, at what cost, whether the senate in Madrid has been consulted, the reports do not say; and its treasury, as the same Libertad Digital has reported before, is now in its third year on a rolled-over budget. A state that does not vote the money has not voted the war.

Then comes the question that matters most: can the nations of Europe hold the eastern frontier with their own legions, the Americans absent? Among the eleven names, no American appears. My answer is that they can, if they have one head, one count, one seat of war. Yet two commanders will command jointly. We too had two consuls; but at Cannae, with command changing hands day by day, we learned what an army is worth whose mind is split in two.

Nor am I blind to what is prudent in this plan. Whoever holds the sea and the ports holds the supply. I took New Carthage in a single day because the Carthaginians kept their arsenal and harbour in Spain there, and I had studied the tide before I studied the walls. They are right, then, to put the fleet and the clearing of the sea first, right to rehearse supply before the battle line. I praise Fabius too: "one man, by delaying, restored the state to us." But he delayed with the enemy standing in Italy, to wear him down; these men postpone until the war is over. That was delay; this is waiting.

My counsel, therefore: first, that every ally declare its contingent openly, so that the alliance is not made of names instead of soldiers; next, that there be one command, not two; third, that the sea and the ports be guarded before the plains; last, that Spain tell its senate and its citizens what it is sending, lest its help be a mere ornament of the alliance. Those who do this will hold the frontier without a foreign garrison. Those who do not will learn that legions which promise to come only after victory do not guard a frontier; they wait on someone else's triumph.