The premature attack on Saarbrücken—the first skirmish of the war—was undertaken in accordance with the plan. It was a good move on the assumption that the French were ready to follow it up; but they were not ready to follow it up, and therefore it was a bad move. The failure to follow it up was as fatal in the diplomatic as in the military sense, for it gave point to the Archduke Albert’s report that the French army did not seem to him as strong as he had been led to expect. It served, consequently, as a starting-point for hesitations; but Austria was nevertheless committed, though she drew back from her commitments; and the Archduke’s visit to Paris and his proceedings there give special point to Grammont’s grandiloquent words, addressed on July 15th to the Finance Commission, which he had kept waiting:— “If I have kept the members of the Commission waiting, my excuse is that I had with me, at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Austrian Ambassador and the Italian Minister. I am confident that the Commission will not require me to say any more.” Grammont, when he spoke thus, believed, and had reason to believe, that the proposed Triple Alliance was a real thing. The Austrian contention is that he had mistaken courteous expressions of sympathy for specific pledges; but that view can hardly be maintained in the face of the facts disclosed as to the Archduke Albert’s mission; and other correspondence which has been published is equally at variance with it. Only two days after his speech to the Finance Commission, Grammont wrote a request to Austria for the help promised. He asked that 70,000 or 80,000 Italian troops should be allowed to march through Austria to Bavaria, and that Austria should herself send 150,000 men to Bohemia. If that were done, he said, the peace would be signed in Berlin, and the memories of 1866 would be effaced. But everything depended upon promptitude:— “Never again” (Grammont concluded) “will such an opportunity present itself. Never again will you obtain such effective support. Never will France be so strong as she is to-day, or better armed and equipped, or animated by a more intense enthusiasm.” Whereto Beust replied in a letter addressed to Count Richard Metternich, the Austrian Ambassador, in Paris:— “Be so good as to assure the Emperor and his Ministers once again that, faithful to the engagements defined in the letters exchanged by the two Sovereigns at the end of last year, we consider the cause of France our own, and shall contribute in every way possible to the success of French arms. Our neutrality is only a means towards the true end of our policy: the sole means of completing our armaments without exposing ourselves to a premature attack on the part of Prussia or Russia.” “Or Russia”: those are the words which hold the key to the position.