before.

It is not true, as has been frequently asserted, that France or her
allies were surprised by the German invasion of Belgium, this had
long been foreseen. It is not true, as was believed widely at the
time, that Joffre invited disaster by sending the mass of his troops
into Alsace-Lorraine, yielding to political and patriotic sentiment.
He did nothing of the sort. Such troops as were sent into these
provinces fulfilled their mission and contributed to drawing German
corps away from the north. The bulk of the French armies and the
British Expeditionary Corps were in line along the Belgium frontier
from Arlon to Mons when the Germans began their great drive.

The French were surprised in two respects. They had not foreseen the
rapidity with which the German heavy artillery would reduce the
forts in Belgium, the fall of Namur was the greatest catastrophe of
the first period of the campaign, and they had not dreamed that the
Germans would be able to mobilize so many troops in so short a
period. Joffre had planned to meet the Germans along the Meuse and
the Sambre, that is along the French frontier, but when the German
advance began, his troops on these fronts were outnumbered by at
least two to one, not because the mass of the French troops had been
sent to Alsace-Lorraine, but because the French had not foreseen the
capacity of the Germans to mobilize their reserves and had little
more than their first-line troops ready, while the Germans were
making use of Landwehr and even Landsturm formations in the first
shock.

Once this fact was clearly established, Joffre resolutely drew his
forces back until he was able to put more reserves in the field and
thus approximately restore the balance between the two armies. But
he was still heavily outnumbered at the decisive moment, winning his
great battle with inferior forces. His enemy had reckoned on the
traditional eagerness of the French to attack, and had expected to
obtain a decisive victory, through superior numbers, in the first
days of the war. The impression which the press reports gave in the
early days, that the French were driven from defeat to defeat and
almost succumbed to the German attack is far from accurate. In point
of fact, the French armies, after suffering marked but relatively
insignificant reverses at the outset, reverses due to the blunders
of the subordinate generals in part, and to the greatly superior
German numbers and artillery in the main,