The events of the great war, from 1914 onwards, are too recent and too deeply graven on all our minds to call for lengthy recital or criticism. What many, if not most, people believed to be outside the limits of calculation occurred. The German armies commenced their campaign by outraging the neutrality of Belgium, which, in 1870, even Bismarck had respected. In a few days they crashed down the great Belgian fortresses, which capable experts had calculated would check the Teutonic advance for at least a month, with howitzers specially constructed and tested for that purpose; soon they exhausted the resources of barbarism in torturing, butchering and shooting down unarmed men, women and children whose country they had solemnly sworn to safeguard; and they devastated and destroyed homes, beautiful buildings, and great libraries, which even a Turcoman horde might have spared, and extorted tremendous ransom and blood-money from the defenceless inhabitants. That accomplished, this torrent of ruffianism and infamy poured in upon France with almost irresistible fury. The horrors of 1870-71 were far outdone. The defeats of Mons, Charleroi and Metz, the impossibility that their opponents should resist such overwhelming odds, made the Germans believe that for the second time in half a century they would force Paris to surrender. Then they were prepared to wreak upon the great city, the social capital of Europe, the full vengeance of destruction. It is not easy, even for those who remember what occurred in the terrible year of the downfall of the Second Empire, and the prostration of the French Republic before the German invaders, to imagine what were the feelings of all Frenchmen who went through that period of martyrdom for their country when they saw a still worse storm of brutality and hatred breaking out upon them--when, too, more rapidly than before, Amiens was in danger and Paris seriously threatened. Clemenceau, with his devotion to France and almost worship of the city where he had spent his whole manhood, was more hardly hit than perhaps any of his countrymen. He had experienced the horrors of the former invasion; and though, when France was at its lowest, he never despaired of the Republic, no ordinary man of seventy-three could possess the resource and resilience of a man of thirty.