From the merely military standpoint, the shattering of three army corps is a huge price to pay even for victory. But the shattering of General von Emmich’s army accomplished nothing. It had merely proved that to hurl men in massed formation against positions defended by modern guns and rifles is folly. Elementary common sense, however, would enforce the same conclusion. As the assaults upon Liége showed, elementary common sense is not a strong point of Prussian militarism. Because massed formations were used with effect by Frederick the Great, massed formations were the one idea of some of his would-be venerators. The moral effect was greater than the military. It brought down in three days all that edifice of prestige which Prussian diplomacy, Prussian espionage, and Prussianised philosophy had been labouring for a generation to build up. To say that Europe gasped with surprise is to state the effect mildly. The peoples opposed to German ambitions woke as from a spell. The aspect of the war had changed. Here was an army, part of the great Fighting Machine in which war was presumed to be practically embodied as an exact science, beginning a campaign with the blunder of assuming that men fighting for their country were no better than half-trained mercenaries. The resistance to the passage of the Meuse; the resistance offered to the troops sent to seize the country south of Liége was treated as negligible. A general of resource and experience would have reckoned on that resistance as a certainty. Neither Prussian strategy then, nor Prussian tactics, were the perfection they had been taken to be. Both had broken at the first test. Nowhere was the gravity of the moral effect better appreciated than at Berlin. Henceforward the effort of Berlin was to efface it. In that fact will be found the key to all the succeeding “severities” in Belgium. That in Berlin, at all events in official and informed quarters, the surprise was as profound as elsewhere is proved by the fact that on August 9, through the neutral channel of the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, the German Government made a second offer. The offer was in these terms:--