done more than any other feat of arms in that
year to save the French Revolution from the allied governments of
Europe. It was, indeed, full of historic memories, from the moment
when Caesar had defeated the Nervii upon the Sambre just to the west of
the town (his camp can still be traced in an open field above the
river bank) to the invasion of 1815.

But this role which it had played throughout French history had not
led to any illusion with regard to the role it might play in any
modern war; and at the best Maubeuge, in common with the other
ill-fortified points of the Belgian frontier, suffered from the only
error--and that a grave one--which their thorough unnational political
system had imposed upon the military plan of the French. This error
was the capital error of indecision. No consistent plan had been
adopted with regard to the fortification of the Belgian frontier.

The French had begun, after the recuperation following upon the war of
1870, an elaborate and very perfect system of fortification along
their German frontier--that is, along the new frontier which divided
the annexed territory of Alsace-Lorraine from the rest of the country.
They had taken it for granted that the next German attempt would be
made somewhere between Longwy and Belfort. And they had spent in this
scheme of fortification, first and last, the cost of a great campaign.
They had spent some three hundred million pounds; and it will be
possible for the reader to gauge the magnitude of this effort if he
will consider that it was a military operation more costly than was
the whole of the South African War to Great Britain, or of the
Manchurian War to Russia. The French were wise to have undertaken this
expense, because it had hitherto been an unheard-of offence against
European morals that one nation in Christendom should violate the
declared neutrality of another. And the attack upon Belgium as a means
of invading France by Germany had not then crossed the mind of any but
a few theorists who had, so to speak, "marched ahead" of the rapid
decline in our common religion which had marked now three
generations.

But when the French had completed this scheme of fortification, Europe
heard it proposed by certain authorities in Prussia that, as the cost
of invading France through the now fortified zone would be
considerable, the German forces should not hesitate to originate yet
another step in the breakdown of European morality, and to sacr