This is the judgment of a neutral writer[3] on the Battle of the Marne, and certainly it would have taken very little to turn the scale so that the victory might have fallen to us and a retreat been avoided. But the really decisive factor was that the German offensive was no longer strong enough to break through in the face of an enemy country bristling with armaments. The withdrawal of the German armies after the dazzling successes which had been achieved at the beginning could not but in the nature of things cause bitter disappointment at home. It ought, however, to be borne in mind that, if Moltke was able to achieve a Metz and a Sedan, he none the less had at his disposal forces considerably superior in numbers to those of the enemy, since, at the beginning of the war of 1870, the numbers of the German forces as compared to the French were in the ratio of 5 to 3. At the beginning of the War of 1914, on the other hand, the armed force of France alone was slightly in excess of the whole mobilised strength of Germany, while if we deduct the German forces employed in the East and those which were in the first instance kept at home for coast defence, the French, English, and Belgians possessed a numerical superiority of something like three-quarters of a million men. In addition to this, when the German Western army engaged in the Battle of the Marne, its original first-line troops had been reduced not only by two army corps which had been sent to the East, but also by two further army corps which it had been necessary to leave behind at Antwerp and Maubeuge. It is the old phenomenon of the wearing down of forces in the course of an offensive which we here encounter anew. In the autumn of 1805 Napoleon crossed the Rhine and the Main with more than 200,000 men; at Austerlitz he engaged with only 75,000. At Eylau, out of the 200,000 men which he had at his disposal after the arrival of the contingent of the Rhenish Confederation in North Germany, he could send into action only 60,000 men, not to speak of the rapid dwindling away of his great army in Russia in 1812. In spite of the considerable superiority which we possessed in 1870-71 at the beginning of the war, and of the fact that the total strength of the German troops which gradually crossed the French frontier, amounted, all told, to 1,147,000 men; in spite of the enormous successes which we achieved at that time; none the less, owing to the unexpectedly long resistance which France with the aid of her new formations opposed to us, we found ourselves more than once, during the second period of the war, faced with a very serious and critical situation. A powerful offensive, aiming at the overthrow of the enemy, has almost always led up to a situation in which it was proved to lack the necessary troops in order to pursue its purpose to the end with complete security. Clausewitz expresses this when he says: "Every attack must lead to defence."[4]