the German staff had turned its eyes from the East to the West. During
the summer of 1915 it had attempted no offensive on the Western front,
but had been content to hold its solid trench lines in the confidence
that neither the British nor the French were prepared for an offensive
on a large scale.

Blue days they were for us with the British Army in France during July
and early August, while the official bulletins revealed on the map how
von Hindenburg's and von Mackensen's legions were driving through
Poland. More critical still the subsequent period when inside
information indicated that German intrigue in Petrograd, behind the
Russian lines which the German guns were pounding, might succeed in
making a separate peace. Using her interior lines for rapid movement of
troops, enclosed by a steel ring and fighting against nations speaking
different languages with their capitals widely separated and their
armies not in touch, each having its own sentimental and territorial
objects in the war, the obvious object of Germany's policy from the
outset would be to break this ring, forcing one of the Allies to
capitulate under German blows.

In August, 1914, she had hoped to win a decisive battle against France
before she turned her legions against Russia for a decision. Now she
aimed to accomplish at Verdun what she had failed to accomplish on the
Marne, confident in her information that France was exhausted. It was
von Hindenburg's turn to hold the thin line while the Germans
concentrated on the Western front twenty-six hundred thousand men, with
every gun that they could spare and all the munitions that had
accumulated after the Russian drive was over. The fall of Paris was
unnecessary to their purpose. Capitals, whether Paris, Brussels, or
Bucharest, are only the trophies of military victory. Primarily the