heart, held with splendid stubbornness and
organization under the protection of the accurate fire from their
field batteries of 75's.

It is estimated that the Germans had actually on the front, or
within ready reach of the front in the battle of the Marne,
2,500,000 men, while the French had 1,500,000. As the population of
France is approximately forty-five million and that of Germany
seventy million, the ratio in armed men to population was
substantially the same for either combatant. For any decisive
offensive the Germans needed that percentage of superior numbers.
The fact that they failed carried its own significance.

Though they withdrew they were by no means decisively beaten. It
might be said--to give them the fullest benefit of the doubt--that
they undertook to buy something and the price was too high. To
insist, however, that they did not make their best effort is to
imply that the Germans were unwilling to pay the price for that
decisive victory which would win the war. They could not take the
risk of going too far or pressing too long and too hard; for that
might have meant, with the rapid mobilization of French reserves, a
defeat that would have thrown them clear out of France and lost the
war for them.

The Germans had profited by all the lessons of the Russo-Japanese
War, which taught the importance of trenches to modern armies, and
also the value of high-explosive shells, but their own expenditure
of shells had been far beyond their anticipation, and so far as we
can learn, at the Marne they faced a shortage. They lacked the
munitions to carry on the battle to a conclusion, even if they
possessed the men and the will.

Accepting the principle of the increased power of the defensive of
modern armies, they fell back to the defensive line of the Aisne,
and now the initiative must be with the French. There followed a
movement of precisely the kind characterizing many battles over a
smaller front and that was the extension of the line as reserves
were brought up by either side.

The French tried to flank the German left but the Germans extended
as rapidly as they, until the month of October found both armies
resting one flank on the sea and the other on Switzerland. Still
another reason for the German withdrawals from the Marne was the
loss of the battle of Lublin by the Austrians, due not to the
inferiority of the Austrian troops so much as to bad generalship.

The German staff was warranted by th