its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by
shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not
located.

So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at
least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as
simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war
began the French would not move a man within five miles of the
frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they
sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the
thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs,
mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were
concentrated for the purpose.

I recalled a remark I had heard: "What a pitiful little offensive that
was!" It was made by one of those armchair "military experts" who
look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in
their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of
knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they
think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the
passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had
taken Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the
Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed
at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of
their efforts as pitiful.

The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was
thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the
slowly mobilizing Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men
on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the