Meanwhile Germany was busy asking her ambassadors to find out what the other Powers would be likely to do if Austria and Germany were to join together to fight Serbia. Germany's agents at St. Petersburg[156] said that Russia would not stir; there were serious labour troubles in that country, and the Czar would be afraid to call his troops together for fear they would join with the strikers. From France came the news that the French army was not fit to fight. On the 13th of July a speaker in the French Parliament declared that the forts were weak; that there was not sufficient ammunition for the guns; and that the soldiers were without a sufficient supply of boots. If war broke out the men would have to take the field with one pair of boots, and only one reserve boot in their knapsacks, and that one would be thirty years old. Thus the Kaiser believed that Russia dared not fight, and that France could not fight, because, as in 1870, she was unprepared. But what of Britain? The Kaiser had flooded the British Isles with spies, who kept him informed of every movement of our fleet and troops, and gave him full information about all our political affairs. These spies told him that civil war was about to break out in Ireland, and that the Government would have its hands so full at home that it could not possibly spare troops to fight on the Continent. The German ambassador in London did not believe all this talk about civil war, and he advised his Government not to rely upon it. The German Government, however, would not listen to him. The Kaiser knew better; he believed his spies. Feeling sure, then, that Russia would not fight, that France could not resist, and that Great Britain would not interfere in what seemed to be a far-off quarrel, the Kaiser decided that "The Day," so long hoped for and prepared for, had come. In July of the present year he was ready to "let slip the dogs of war." [Footnote 148: _Land´vair_.] [Footnote 149: The Sultan of Turkey is the religious head of Mohammedans throughout the world.] [Footnote 150: _Kō´ni-ā_, town, Asia Minor, about 300 m. east of Smyrna.] [Footnote 151: Town of Mesopotamia, on the Tigris.] [Footnote 152: Town on the Shat-el-Arab, 70 m. from the Persian Gulf.] [Footnote 153: So called from the colour of its cover. It contains State documents explaining how the war arose.] [Footnote 154: Country of N. Africa. In 1911 the Germans made a treaty with France, by which they agreed to let the French rule Morocco as a protectorate in return for territory in the French Congo.]