One of the critics General Berthaut started out to controvert is M. Fernand Engerand, deputy for Calvados, whose articles (particularly in _Le Correspondant_, December 10, 1917, and subsequent numbers) have been reprinted in a volume of 600 pages: _Le Secret de la Frontière, 1815–1871–1914_. _Charleroi_ (Paris: Editions Bossard, 43 Rue Madame. 1918). The French plan of campaign, says M. Engerand, was “humanly impossible. Nothing happened as our High Command had foreseen; there was surprise all along the line, and, what is gravest, surprise not only strategic but intellectual, the reversal of a doctrine of war. After the magnificent recovery of the Marne, we may without inconvenience avow that never has there been so complete a self-deception. The error was absolute and, worse, deliberate, for never was an attack more foreseen, more announced, more prophesied than that of August 1914. Strategists of the old school had not only predicted it for forty years, but had given us the means of parrying it; their ideas were scouted and their work was destroyed.” M. Engerand quotes, in particular, Lt.-Colonel Grouard on the impossibility of an immediate French offensive beyond the frontiers (see Grouard, _La Guerre Eventuelle_, 1913; and _L’Art de la Guerre et le Colonel Grouard_, by C. de Bourcet, 1915). Grouard foresaw, among other things, that “the army of the German right, marching by the left bank of the Meuse, would pass the Sambre in the neighbourhood of Charleroi, and direct itself toward the sources of the Oise.” M. Engerand’s chapters contain a summary of the three French offensives. His general comment is: “No unity of command, separate and dislocated battles, no notion of information and safeguards before and during the combat, systematic misconception of the ground and defensive means, defective liaison between the corps and between artillery and infantry, no manœuvre, but only the offensive, blind, systematic, frantic. If we were defeated, is it an exaggeration to say that it was less by the enemy than by a false doctrine?” Lt.-Col. de Thomasson, on these points, quotes warning notes from General Collin’s _Transformation de la Guerre_, written in 1911, and refers to the case of Lt.-Col. Berrot, who, in 1902, had exposed “the dangerous theories that had been deduced from the Napoleonic wars,” and who “was disgraced pitilessly, and died while yet young.” THE SURPRISE IN THE NORTH