"annihilated."
It numbered at least two army corps, or 80,000 men, and of these it is
probable that 50,000 fell into the hands of the enemy, wounded and
unwounded. The remainder, representing the killed, and the chance
units that were able to break out, could hardly have been more than
20,000 to 30,000 men.

Such was the victory of Tannenberg--an immensely successful example of
that enveloping movement which the Germans regarded as their peculiar
inheritance; a victory in nature recalling Sedan, and upon a scale not
inferior to that battle.

The news of that great triumph reached Berlin upon Sedan Day, at the
very moment when the corresponding news from the West was that von
Kluck had reached the gates of Paris, and had nothing in front of him
but the broken and inferior armies of a disastrous defeat.

THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT.

At this point it is well to pause and consider an element of the
vastest consequence to the whole conduct of these great campaigns--I
mean the element of German confidence.

Here we have a nation which has received within a fortnight of its
initial large operations, within the first five weeks of a war which
it had proudly imposed upon its enemies, the news of a victory more
startlingly triumphant than its most extreme expectation of success
had yet imagined possible.

Let the reader put himself into the position of a German subject in
his own station of life, a town dweller, informed as is the English
reader by a daily press, which has come to be his sole source of
opinion, enjoying or suffering that almost physical self-satisfaction
and trust in the future which is, unfortunately, not peculiar to the
North German, but common in varying degree to a whole school of morals
to-day. Let him remember that this man has been specially tutored and
coached into a complete faith in the superiority of himself and his
kind over the rest of the human race, and this in a degree superior
even to that in which other nations, including our own, have indulged
after periods of expanding wealth and population.

Let the reader further remember that in this the Germans' rooted faith
their army was for them at once its cause and its expression; then
only can he conceive what attitude the mind of such men would assume
upon the news from East and from West during those days--the news of
the avalanche in France and the news of Tannenberg. It would seem to
the crowd in Berlin during the great festival which ma