Now at this same moment orders had been issued by the Government of which the Chancellor was the head to move the advance-posts of the German army on the French frontiers. And these orders were carried out on the following day, as we now know from the French Minister’s despatch to M. Cambon, dated July 31st. “The German army,” he writes, “had its advance-posts on our frontiers yesterday.” And we further learn from M. Sazonoff that even before this date “absolute proof was in possession of the Russian Government that Germany was making military and naval preparations against Russia--more particularly in the direction of the Gulf of Finland.”[30] The disingenuousness, not to use a harsher term, of these diplomatic methods needs no comment. It is one of the inseparable marks of German diplomacy and German journalism, which are as odious in peace as are German methods of warfare during a campaign. Of plain dealing and truthful speech there is no trace. Underlying the assurances, hopes, and sincere regrets with which all German conversations with our diplomatists are larded, it is easy to distinguish the steady tendency to impress our Foreign Office with Germany’s fervid desire to maintain peace, her bitter disappointment at being forced step by step into war, and her humanitarian resolve to keep that war within the narrowest possible limits. And with all the documents and the subsequent facts before us, it is just as easy to perceive the real drift of the Kaiser’s scheming. Great Britain was to be made to feel that anything which Germany might be forced to do in the way of disregarding treaties would be done with the utmost reluctance and only under duress. The building up of this conviction was one of the main objects of the curious expedients resorted to by her clumsy statesmen, and was at the same time the overture to the last act in which the Treaty of 1839 was to be flung aside as a scrap of paper, but “without prejudice” to British interests.