Joffre was certainly unprepared for the speed with which the enemy brought into play his reserves. This was due to the cunning use which he made of his strategic railways, but also to a perfidious advance in the date of mobilisation. The army was already on a war footing when France had begun her work of assembling troops. And so Joffre was handicapped by many things, by lack of rapid railway transit, of heavy cannon and of the minute preparation and prevision which extended to the years preceding his appointment. Germany had prepared for war whilst France was thinking of peace and dreaming of progress in art and letters and general culture, anticipating a universal brotherhood, pathetically chimerical in the face of the armaments across the Rhine. Politics were greatly responsible for the inferiority of France in the opening weeks of the war. The troops assembled on the Franco-Belgian frontier had not at once the value of the invading force. They were wanting in numbers, in the perfection of their equipment and in the intensity of their training. Though Joffre had justly condemned incompetence in high places, it is also true that France was overweighted by the masses of a highly trained enemy which placed all its reliance upon the strength and rapidity of the first blow. The Socialist doctrine would have substituted popular _élan_ and the fierce revolutionary spirit for what it held to be the sterile stupidity of a long and intensive military preparation. And again, the Socialist movement in Germany proved a snare and delusion to many of the faith in France. Was it possible that war could come when millions of the masses in each nation were vowed to peace? The nation was deceived—perhaps it wanted to be deceived. In any case, it was much more interesting to concentrate upon human progress, to let the mind dwell upon the delightful prospect of the millennium, when there will be no more war, and when an era of peace and tranquillity and of mutual co-operation will have been ushered in, than to linger upon a picture of militarism bound up with cannon and its human food.