The General Staff and the War College for the training of officers had clung faithfully to the strategy which had led to the victories of the past—that of bringing up superior forces with all speed to a given point, and in this way breaking the enemy’s line of defence; or that of outflanking and surrounding one of his wings, and thus overcoming his resistance by a flank attack. This method of going to work presupposes an offensive. Moltke, like Napoleon, held that merely by taking the offensive one has gone halfway towards winning the battle. These maxims were in harmony with the old Prussian traditions, as well as with the qualities instilled into the Prussian or Prussianized soldier, and, finally, with the speedy mobilization of the Imperial army. The decisive victories which in the space of a fortnight had brought the Bulgarians almost to the gates of Constantinople, once more bore witness, so the Germans asserted, to the value of this strategy. Had not the King of Greece, it was added, publicly paid a tribute to the instruction received by him at the Berlin Staff College, on the day when, like a good pupil at a prize-giving, he had been presented with a field-marshal’s baton by the Emperor in person? The Manchurian campaign, it is true, had warned the world—as was noted at the time by military writers—that a revolution was taking place in the art of war. It revealed a new system of strategy and tactics, applied by the Russians and Japanese on a front of enormous length—long parallel lines of trenches, where both sides burrowed themselves in for weeks, before there was any possibility of striking a decisive blow. The experts of Berlin, however, would not hear of this war of moles. They were confident, even now, of making an attack on France with a rapidity that nothing could withstand. They went on dreaming only of whirlwind offensives, of whole armies forced to capitulate, of fresh Sadowas and Sedans. While the German strategy was still looked upon with general admiration, the case was different as regards the tactics, particularly the use of infantry, which was much discussed by foreign officers resident in Berlin. One of them, on returning from the great manœuvres of 1913, confessed to me his astonishment at the fighting methods to which the infantry were trained. “They still go in for the assault in close formation,” he said, “the _Sturmangriff_, which used to be successful. But nowadays, on a battlefield swept by artillery and machine-guns, these close formations would give the other side as good a target as they could wish for. If an attack were led in this way against an enemy who is under cover or is himself determined not to give ground, there would soon be nothing left of it but a heap of dead bodies.”