But if Bloch had discounted the personal element of modern warfare, his theories otherwise were justified by events. The Germans knew their Bloch and heartily believed his doctrine, but in the opening stages of the battle they made a desperate effort to escape from his conclusions. They began in what Mr. Wells in a famous chapter called the "1900 spirit," that is to say, they were convinced that neither England nor France was alive to the latest trench warfare. Their first methods, the precipitate attack, massed movements and enveloping tactics, were dictated by the thought that their adversaries were old-fashioned fighters who had not learned this doctrine of the squatting war, who had not, in fact, read their Bloch or drawn from him the lessons the Germans had. And so they fought in the open in these first phases of the campaign, trusting by their force and speed, superior leadership and brutal shock tactics to bear down the Allies before they were prepared to meet them. And, of course, they were greatly aided in this traditional method of fighting by the fact that they had been allowed to build unchallenged strategic railways to their frontiers, which enabled them to pour a million men into the country, instead of the 300,000 that the French General Staff expected by the northern route. The ready adaptation of the Allies to the new exigencies of war forced the Germans to rush to earth. There came a change so sudden that it seemed as if one had jumped literally from one century to another. "We have driven them underground," said M. Paul Deschanel, the eloquent President of the Chamber. But after they sank into the earth the Germans still made desperate efforts to escape Bloch’s conclusion: that immobility which he predicted as being the inevitable result of the conflict of armed nations. They endeavoured by their inventive genius to break that immobility. By asphyxiating gas, by liquid fire, by aerial warfare (especially against England), did they seek, as Mr. Wells points out, to create, such diversion as would avoid so barren a conclusion to armed effort.