true balance between these initial movements and the great conflicts
to which they were no more than an introduction.

1. War, as a whole, had grown unfamiliar to Western Europe. War on
such a scale as this was quite untried. There was nothing in
experience to determine our judgment, and after so long a peace,
during which the habits of civil life had ceased to be conventioned
and had come to seem part of the necessary scheme of things, the first
irruption of arms dazzled or confounded the imagination of all.

2. The first shock, falling as it did upon the ring fortress of
Liége, at once brought into prominence one of the chief questions of
modern military debate, the value of the modern ring fortress, and
promised to put to the test the opposing theories upon this sort of
stronghold.

3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the
cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without
question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that
anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe.
Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that
remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather
sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European
territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is
inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which