"In the first instance the Prussian Empire had made no sound reckoning of the forces she had to meet. That was the first elementary duty of the strategist. The man who goes out to fight ten thousand and finds he has to fight twenty thousand has blundered irreparably. In 1914 Prussia calculated that Great Britain would not participate in the war, and would consent not only to the destruction of France but to the betrayal of her obligations towards Belgium. The bewildered dismay with which Germany learned that Great Britain would not look upon the treaty with Belgium as a 'scrap of paper,' the wild hatred toward England which found one expression in the 'Hymn of Hate,' were the screams of a savage creature caught in a trap.
"She had then one slender chance, a rush attack on Paris. But the Battle of the Marne killed that chance. Then the only hope of saving Germany was to make peace. But she had made the ghastly blunder of the Belgian atrocities.
"When a man goes out to fight ten thousand and finds himself confronted by twenty thousand it is common prudence to strive to make the stakes as low as possible, the penalty of failure as small as possible. There was a chance that, if that policy had been followed, the war would have come to an end soon after the Battle of the Marne, an end not favourable to Prussian ideas of European domination, giving those ideas a severe check, but still not wrecking them irrevocably nor exacting a very heavy penalty. But the Prussian spirit added blunder to blunder. Having launched a hopeless war it set itself to give that war an 'unlimited' character. Instead of going through Belgium as a reluctant trespasser, the Prussian army trampled through as a ravaging devastator in full blast of frightfulness. By the time Prussia had fought and lost the Battle of the Marne she had steeled her enemies to an inflexible resolution against a compromise peace."
Prussia, he argued, thus early by two blunders of the first magnitude (1) entered into a campaign against an alliance which ultimately could command vastly superior forces, and (2) embittered the conditions of the campaign so that her withdrawal from it was made exceedingly difficult. Several blunders of a lesser order marked the first stages of the campaign. Belgium having been attacked and Liége taken, the Prussian army showed a strange hesitancy and lack of enterprise when faced by the little Belgian army on the line Haelen-Tirlemont-Namur. Precious days were lost in pottering. Whether it was expected that the Belgian nation would give way after one defeat, or it was thought that French and British armies had been pushed up into Belgium, the German millions were held up an unduly long time by the Belgian thousands.
At Mons the German Army neither crushed the French-British force nor pushed it back so quickly that the main deployment was harassed. Whether this failure of the German Army was due to its bad handling or to the excellent virtues of the French-British force, did not matter. But the Battle of Mons frustrated the only hope that was left to Germany at that time—a successful rush on Paris opening the way to a quick peace. It proved that there was no military genius at the head of the German invaders. Then the Army which had been delayed in Belgium was defeated on the Marne and had to fall back on the Aisne. The explanation for this given in some German quarters was that the Army had outstripped its big guns and ammunition supplies. That was as good as any other. No explanation would clear the Prussian Military Command from the stigma that it failed when there was that one remaining desperate chance of success.
And having failed on the Marne and retreated to the Aisne the German strategic plan lost all coherency. True, the war was lost so far as any hope of winning European dominancy was concerned. But there was still as a possible objective a peace which would secure Prussia something in return for the territory which she had overrun. Such a peace had been made difficult by the cold rage inspired by Prussian frightfulness. But it was the only possible aim left and, from a military point of view, it could only be pursued in one way, by a definite hammering at some vital point to secure a decisive result, with a defensive stand in other quarters. A defensive campaign in the East with a determined offensive in the West, or a defensive on the West with a resolute offensive on the East.
The Prussian vacillated between the two; his effort was always shuttlecocking East to West, West to East, getting a decisive result nowhere. Like a baited bull in the arena Prussia was constantly making sensational rushes here and there, gratified often by the sight of fleeing foes, but never breaking out of the arena of doom, and always losing blood.
"The first three months of the war," he concluded dogmatically, "were decisive. They do not redound to the military glory of Prussia. During those three months the disciplined and trained devotion of the German troops worked wonders in the battle line. But indecision at Headquarters prevented the proper concentration of their efforts. Prussia had failed to conquer Europe unprepared. She was afterwards face to face with the task of conquering Europe prepared; and her indecision increased. She was always looking for success in a new quarter and never finding it. Recklessness and vacillation and impatience are not sound military qualities, but they mark the whole military history of Germany since November, 1914. Recklessness of ultimate consequences was shown in such matters as the bringing of poison gas into use. Vacillation was shown by the effort which was organised to take the French Channel ports at all costs, and, failing, was diverted to the Eastern Front, and back again to this Front, and then again to the Balkan Front, and back to this Front and then to the Italian Front and finally back to this Front. Impatience was shown in the general failure to push any effort to its logical conclusion, and in details, such as the haste with which poison gas was put into use on a small and ineffectual scale instead of being kept in reserve for a great and possibly decisive effort."
"Take it year by year," this officer concluded, "it has been always the same. Germany has added always to the area of destruction. She has never got nearer to victory. It will be the same with this Push. If that motor lorry has to carry away the maps from Montreuil it may be another ten years before we beat the Germans, but we will beat them."
"But if France gives in?"