Its immediate weakness arose from the wide extension of forces not larger, except at certain points, allowing no general reserve and no large reinforcement, and from the necessity of great speed. The plan ignored many possibilities, from the Alps to Lille; once in motion, however, it could not be considerably or rapidly changed. Berlin, confident in the superiority of the war-machine to which it had devoted its best resources and thought, believed there would be no delay and no need of change. France had been inevitably handicapped by the need of renouncing any initiative that could throw doubt upon her moral position, by the independence of her British and Belgian Allies, and by uncertainty as to Italy. This last doubt was, however, quickly removed; the Belgian Army delayed the invasion by a full week; and our “Old Contemptibles” gave most precious aid. A united Command at that time might have done little more than strengthen the instrument and confirm the doctrine whose imperfections we have traced. The instrument was inferior not only in effective strength, not only in some vital elements of arms and organisation, but in the system and spirit of its direction. The doctrine of the offensive, general, continuous, and unrestrained, had become an established orthodoxy during the previous decade, when the Russian alliance and the British Entente were fixed, when service was extended to three years, the 75 mm. gun was perfected, and a new method of railway mobilisation promised that the armies would be brought into action at least as rapidly as those of the enemy. Before a shot was fired, it had prejudiced the military information services——whence the scepticism of the Staff as to a large German movement west of the Meuse, and as to the German use of army corps of reserve in the first line; whence the ignorance of the German use of aeroplanes and wired entrenchment. No answer was prepared to the German heavy artillery. While unable to create the means to a successful general offensive, the French Command had discounted, if not positively discredited, modern methods of defence and delaying manœuvre, methods peculiarly indicated in this case, since France had the same reasons for postponing a decision as Germany had for hastening it. The only hope of the Allies at the outset lay in a combination of defence and manœuvre: there was no adequate defence, and no considerable manœuvre, but only a general headlong attack on a continuous line. Of the consequences of this lamentable beginning, an accomplished and sober French officer says: “It is just to speak of the Battle of the Frontiers as calamitous, for this battle not only doomed to total or partial ruin nine of our richest departments: insufficiently repaired by the fine recovery on the Marne, it weighed heavily upon the whole course of the war. It paralysed our strategy. From September 1914, our High Command was necessarily absorbed in the task, first, of limiting, then of reducing,