ter in the
Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the
enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat
nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though
their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part
been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of
Paris.

With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the
enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I
will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten
days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the
Allied attitude towards the next phase of the war.

But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the
topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must
also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion
at home behind them, for upon this moral factor everything ultimately
depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is
the soul.

It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this
terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to
comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this
object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary
events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must
turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian
forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which
was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the
splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the
secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in
their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to
comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture
of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies,
particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in their doomed
territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper
of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the
tissue of modern Germany.

Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand
either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future
developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this
series.

I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of
that mood in their histor