or in practice the more successful. The French and Latin tradition
seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence
which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to
Paris. The modern German conception seems to the French theatrical,
divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak. Either critic may
be right or either wrong. Our interest is to follow the particular
schemes developing from that tone of mind. We shall see how, in the
first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified
itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was
embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German
initiative was lost under the success--only barely achieved after
dreadful risk--of the French plan.

That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in
particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger
number, may be most accurately defined as _the open strategic square_,
and its leading principle is "the method of detached reserves."

This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a
diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the
complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the
first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the
inferior number to bring up a _locally_ superior weight against a
_generally_ superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive
place.

Let us suppose that a general commanding _twelve_ large units--say,
twelve army corps--knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an
enemy commanding no less than _sixteen_ similar units.