A Short History of the Great War | Page 8

division when on 4 August England declared
war.
Had we counted the cost? the German Chancellor asked our
ambassador in Berlin on the eve of the declaration. The cost would not
have affected our decision, but it was certainly not anticipated, and the
Entente was ill-prepared to cope with the strength displayed by
Germany. The British Navy was, indeed, as ready as the German Army,
and the command of the sea passed automatically into our hands when
the German Fleet withdrew from the North Sea on 26 July. But for that
circumstance not a single division could have been sent across the sea,
and the war would have been over in a few months. Nor was the British
Army unprepared for the task that had been allotted to it in anticipation.
It was the judgment not only of our own but of Allied Staffs that an
expeditionary force of six divisions would suffice to balance German
superiority in the West; and that force, consisting of better material
better trained than any other army in the field, was in its place in the
line of battle hundreds of miles from its base within three weeks of the
declaration of war. The real miscalculation was of the respective
strength of France and Germany, and no one had foreseen that it would
ultimately require three times the force that France could put in the
field to liberate French soil from the German invader. The National
Service League would have provided us with a large army; but even its
proposals were vitiated by their assumption that these forces were
needed to do the navy's work of home-defence, and by the absence of
provision for munitions, without which sending masses of men into
battle was sending them to useless slaughter. Time was needed to
remedy these miscalculations, but time was provided by our command
of the sea, about which there had been no misjudgment and no lack of
pre-vision. We made our mistakes before, and during the war, but
neither Mr. Asquith's Governments nor that of his successor need fear
comparison with those of our Allies or our enemies on that account;
and it is merely a modest foible of the people, which has hardly lost a
war for nearly four hundred years, to ascribe its escape to fortune, and
to envy the prescience and the science which have lightened the path of

its enemies to destruction.

CHAPTER II
THE GERMAN INVASION Germany began the war on the Western
front before it was declared, and on 1-2 August German cavalry
crossed the French frontier between Luxemburg and Switzerland at
three points in the direction of Longwy, Lunéville, and Belfort. But
these were only feints designed to prolong the delusion that Germany
would attack on the only front legitimately open to warfare and to delay
the reconstruction of the French defence required to meet the real
offensive. The reasons for German strategy were conclusive to the
General Staff, and they were frankly explained by Bethmann-Hollweg
to the British ambassador. There was no time to lose if France was to
be defeated before an effective Russian move, and time would be lost
by a frontal attack. The best railways and roads from Berlin to Paris ran
through Belgium; the Vosges protected more than half of the French
frontier south of Luxemburg, Belfort defended the narrow gap between
them and Switzerland, and even the wider thirty miles' gap between the
northern slopes of the Vosges and Luxemburg was too narrow for the
deployment of Germany's strength; the way was also barred by the
elaborate fortifications of Verdun, Toul, and Nancy. Strategy pointed
conclusively to the Belgian route, and its advantages were clinched by
the fact that France was relying on the illusory scrap of paper. Her
dispositions assumed an attack in Lorraine, and her northern
fortifications round Lille, Maubeuge, and Hirson were feeble compared
with those of Belfort, Toul, and Verdun. Given a rapid and easy march
through Belgium, the German armies would turn the left flank of the
French defence and cut it off from the capital. Hence the resistance of
Belgium had a great military importance apart from its moral value. To
its lasting honour the Belgian Government had scorned the German
proposal for connivance even in the attractive form which would have
limited the German use of Belgian territory to the eastern bank of the
Meuse.

Haste and contempt for the Belgian Army, whose imperfect
organization was due to a natural reliance on the neutrality which
Germany had guaranteed, accounted for the first derangement of
German plans. The invasion began towards Visé, near the Dutch
frontier where the direct road from Aix to Brussels crosses the Meuse,
but the main advance-guard followed the trunk railway from Berlin to
Paris via Venders and Liège. It was, however,