The war has shown the possibility of training the young soldier in less than six months; but when M. Jaurès presented his scheme none foresaw the fantastic character that the fighting would assume. If it had presented its habitual physiognomy of massed movements in the open, soldiers of six months’ training would have been inadequate to the first shock of battle. Though, as we have shown, there were points in the speech that revealed acute observation and an accurate reading of the times, the treatment of details was deplorable. Here and there his inspiration failed him, as if his mentor, who was known to be Captain Girard, a writer on military topics, had ceased to jog his elbow. One of the least happy of his inventions was his proposal in regard to the "cover." He considered that it was quite adequate with the protection of the Eastern Forts. Again, the frontier departments, being rich and highly industrialised, could organise their own defence. "If you have confidence in the people, if you organise them in unities constituted locally and ready to march at the first sound of the war tocsin, if you launch all these living forces towards the frontier, this, indeed, is the real cover." From this passage you may judge the character of his pleading: the appeal to national sentiment and spontaneous enthusiasm, as opposed to the laboured and essentially mechanical preparation of the Germans. He went to military history to prove that, in 1813, Germany was saved not by her generals formed in the school of Frederick the Great, but by her _landwehr_, which constituted 60 per cent. of the army—peasants hastily armed to defend the soil. Evidently he thought that the old revolutionary spirit would flame forth again in France and suffice against any wanton attack. He was admirable in his description of the German plan to invade France abruptly and to bring her to her knees by forced marches, by a rapid succession of blows, and the occupation of her capital, and then to turn swiftly towards Russia. Jaurès found consolation—alas! unwarranted—in the thought that Germany under Prussian domination would never make full use of her reserves. She was afraid, he said, of a democratic army, afraid of that spirit which had enabled France, amidst all her difficulties and lack of preparation, to resist for seven months, in ’70, and had given Bismarck and Von Moltke a certain anxiety even after Sedan. Better build strategic railways than barracks, he said, so that an avalanche of men might be poured on the frontier to meet the German mass—a conclusion which was wise enough.