Paris had never faltered in its attitude of pure valour even when news lacked and rumour stalked, gaunt-eyed, and unfettered by the least fact, along the Boulevards. Galliéni’s appointment to the governorship of the city put fire into hesitating pulses and new courage into hearts. To see him crossing the street in his uniform of cerulean blue, that attractive colour of the French Army, was to receive a lesson in youth and virility. He had the look of the fighter grateful to Parisians, who, recalling their past, did not like the notion of being handed over tamely to the enemy as an "open" city. An open city, forsooth! What ignominy for the capital of all the talents! When the Governor was formally invested on August 26, 1914, the muscles of his _administrés_ grew tense with resolution. Then there would be resistance, resistance to the point of street fighting. Inch by inch the town would be disputed. The Eiffel Tower would be blown up, so that the enemy could not use its apparatus and antennæ to transmit or receive messages; bridges would be destroyed and the Underground would be rendered useless. The two million inhabitants who remained faithful to the city would be evacuated to the communes south and west of the metropolitan area. This was the plan as revealed later, and was apparently authentic. That the Governor thought the measures would be necessary I do not believe; but it was well to be prepared. In his military eye the enemy could not enter the city until the home army had been destroyed; that was an elementary principle of warfare. But how much did the Germans know, definitely, of the condition of the Allies? One had to be quite sure of that before one could forecast with accuracy their line of action. Did they consider the Allies were definitely crushed? It seems almost certain that they did. Such a state of mind is revealed in the despatches they sent from the front, each more affirmative than the other. They told of the utter rout of the French, of their inability to withstand the advance. Thus, as Colonel Feyler points out, the Germans were in much the frame of mind of Napoleon at Waterloo. History was repeating itself in new conditions. Napoleon disdained Wellington, whom he considered a mediocre general, and Blücher, a brave but blundering hussar, and so, without sufficient preparation, sent his legions against the British lines. If the German commanders had not the sublime arithmetic of Napoleon: "One hundred and twenty thousand men _and I_ make two hundred thousand," that was the spirit of their calculations. They were impressed with their own invincibility. And there was some excuse for their belief that the English had been annihilated and the French demoralised. The British Army was only saved by bull-dog tenacity and a constitutional inability to accept defeat; the French showed a new quality of resistance because of the presence of their Three-Year soldiers—the three "Regular" classes