On two occasions since then these strictures and the German anticipations which were built upon them came back to my mind with painful vividness. During the first couple of weeks after the war, I heard the Belgians in Liége, Louvain, Brussels, Alost, Ghent, and Bruges anxiously inquiring, “Where are the French troops that should be here to succour us? When are they coming? It is only a few hours’ railway journey to Paris. Why are they not here? Surely they have had ample time to get to Belgium.” And when I ransacked my brain for a comforting reply, all I found there was the image of the German statesman propounding his view of French railways and the chaotic confusion which would accompany and retard mobilization. The second time I recalled that conversation on reading the newspaper accounts of the fall of Namur. The Namur forts were to have held out for weeks or months, we had been told, because they were the most powerful in Europe, and also because the triangle between the Sambre and the Meuse was held by French army corps in great force. But it turned out that the French troops which were believed to be there had not yet arrived, owing to difficulties that had been encountered _in the mobilization_. These were the difficulties that had been foretold me, that were confidently counted upon by the German War Ministry, and of which I warned the French Government over two years ago. Those statements were volunteered to me in order that I should make them known in Great Britain as arguments to be taken into account when the attitude of our own Government came up for discussion. As a matter of course, I never brought them forward, my own conviction having been uttered in season and out of season for twenty years--that all Germany’s energies, military, naval, financial, commercial, diplomatic, and journalistic, had been focussed upon exhaustive preparations for a tremendous struggle to establish Teutonic supremacy in Europe, that that struggle was unavoidable, and that the German war-machine was in all respects worthy of the money, time, and energies that had been spent on creating and perfecting it, and that no European army could compete with it. Over and over again I expressed my regret at finding the people of Great Britain irrationally hopeful and unsuspecting, utterly ignorant of Germany’s systematic strivings and subversive machinations, yet unwilling to learn from those who were conversant with these matters. A considerable section of the French people was equally trustful and supine. They were the blind of the class that will not see. They pointed to the honest Chancellor, to the peace-loving Kaiser, to the fair-minded professors and journalists who had assured the British people that it had nothing to fear, and to the treaties which they considered binding. They laughed to scorn the notion that these instruments would be treated as scraps of paper. In October, 1911, I wrote: