“You must surely have read the disclosures about the plight of the French army recently made by Senator Humbert,” politicians remarked to me. “They reveal a condition of affairs which renders France, as we say in German, ‘harmless.’ It would be a mistake, therefore, to take the Republic too seriously. Such fighting power as is left in her is but a pithless simulacrum of what once was hers. You doubt the accuracy of the Senator’s allegations? But they are of a piece with everything else we saw and heard and knew of France long before M. Humbert rose to complain of the mess his friends and colleagues had made of the national defences. But if you want a more direct proof, read the corroborating testimony of the present War Minister, M. Messimy. That personage must surely know. He took stock of his department before uttering his opinion. And he endorsed the judgment of the Senator. No. France among virile nations is what Maxim Gorky’s ‘beings that once were men’ are among the social classes. She is to be included among the submerged. And that is why your Government will shake her off if she is drawn into war for Russia’s sake. You cannot save a nation against itself. And France is dying gradually of self-inflicted wounds. “One of the most valuable assets of a nation which has to hold its possessions by force of arms is the ease and rapidity with which it can get its fighting men and material together and throw them into the enemy’s country. Well, no country can approach Germany or even Austria in this respect. Our system of mobilization goes with unparalleled smoothness and velocity. To use a slang phrase, which is not without picturesqueness, it works with the swiftness and sureness of greased lightning. Now of all countries in Europe, Russia herself not excepted, the French are the most backward in this respect. Forty-four years’ peace have not provided them with leisure enough to make perceptible progress in this elementary operation of war.” To my query on what grounds this amazing statement could be advanced and supported, I was treated to a sort of lecture on the subject which was then applied to the French railway system in the following ingenious way: