red, the reduction of the forts was not of
immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully
achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liege, to grasp
a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the
buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position,
and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two
rivers Sambre and Meuse at their junction.

With this entry of the Germans into Namur, their passage of the lines
upon Friday, August 21st, their capture of the bridgeheads on
Saturday, August 22nd, we reach the beginning of those great
operations which threatened for a moment to decide the war in the
West, and to establish the German Empire in that position to attain
which it had planned and forced the war upon its appointed day.

It behoves us before entering into the detail of this large affair to
see the plan of it clearly before our eyes.

* * * * *

I have already described that general conception underlying the whole
modern French school of strategy for which the best title (though one
liable to abuse by too mechanical an interpretation) is "the open
strategic square."

I have further warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which
the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the
manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of
such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its
simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice
those lines remain only in the idea of the scheme of the whole, and
are not to be discovered save in the loosest way from the actual
positions of men upon the map.

We have seen that this "open strategic square" involved essentially
two conceptions--the fixed "operative corner" and the swinging
"manoeuvring masses."

The manoeuvring masses, at this moment when the great German blow fell
upon the Sambre and the Meuse, and when Namur went down immediately
before it, were (_a_) upon the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, (_b_)
in the centre of the country, (_c_) near the capital and to the west
of it, and even, some of them, upon the sea.

The operative corner was this group of armies before Namur on the
Sambre and Meuse, the 4th French Army under Langle, the 5th French
Army under Lanrezac, the British contingent under French.

We know from what has been written above in this book that it is the
whole