the war. The German surprise, so long and so carefully prepared, had
failed, and the knockout blow had been parried. The Allied victory had
not decided how the war would end, but it had decided that the war
would be long--a test of endurance rather than of generalship, a
struggle of peoples and a conflict of principles rather than duel
between professional armies. There would be time for peaceful and even
unarmed nations to gird themselves in defence; and the cause of
democracy would not go down because military autocrats had thought to
dispose of France before her allies could effectively intervene.


CHAPTER III

RUSSIA MOVES

The first month of the war in the West had coincided more nearly with
German plans than with Entente hopes, but both Germany and the Western
Allies agreed in miscalculating Russia. The great Moltke had remarked
early in his career that Russia had a habit of appearing too late on
the field and then coming too strong. The war was to prove that to be
a fault of democracy rather than of autocrats, and Russia intervened
with an unexpected promptitude which was to be followed in time by an
equally unexpected collapse. The forecasting of the course of wars is
commonly left to military experts, and military experts commonly err
through ignoring the moral and political factors which determine the
weight and distribution of military forces. The soldier, so far as he
looks behind armies at all, only looks to the numbers from which those
armies may be recruited, and pays scant regard to the political,
moral, social, and economic conditions which may make havoc of armies,
evoke them where they do not exist, or transfer them to unforeseen