scales in the military balance. Russia appeared to the strategist as a
vast reservoir of food for powder which would take time to mobilize,
but prove almost irresistible if it were given time. Both these
calculations proved fallacious, and still less was it foreseen that
the reservoir would revolt. The first misjudgment deranged the German
plans, the second those of the Allies, while the third upset the minds
of the world.

The outbreak of war found Russia with a peace-strength of over a
million men, a war-strength of four millions, and reserves which were
limited not by her population but by her capacity for transport,
organization, and production of munitions. Her Prussian frontiers were
guarded by no natural defences, but neither were Prussia's. Nature, it
has been said, did not foresee Prussia; Prussia is the work of men's
hands. Nor had Nature foreseen Russia, and men's hands had not made up
the deficiency. Mechanical means had remedied the natural defects of
Prussia's frontier, but not those of the Russian; and Russia's defence
consisted mainly in distance, mud, and lack of communications. The
value of these varied, of course, with the seasons, and the
motor-transport, which atoned to some extent for the lack of railways,
told in favour of German science and industry, and against the
backward Russians. Apart from the absence of natural defences, the
Russian frontier had been artificially drawn so as to make her Polish
province an indefensible salient, though properly organized it would
have been an almost intolerable threat alike to East Prussia and to
Austrian Galicia. But for her preoccupation in the West, Germany could
have conquered Poland in a fortnight, and Russian plans, indeed,
contemplated a withdrawal as far as the line of Brest-Litovsk. As it
was, the German offensive in Belgium and France left the defence of
Prussia to the chances of an Austrian offensive against Lublin, a