ently characteristic of the French
military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history
played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has
attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military
objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the
single object of victory in foreign war.

It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the
military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is
assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object
disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as
they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of
the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the
conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise,
the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of
a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with
defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient,
tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the
requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so
against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of
the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is
in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and
salutary exception to the rule--their failure against Caesar; from
which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition--still
vigorous.

* * * * *

The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not
defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel,
the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Chalons, while the
British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting
its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day,
2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its
end.

The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the
French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to
the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew
their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the
Allied forces--a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have
guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in
their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really
was, for they could hardly bel