But in every sense this Battle of the Marne was one of the few really decisive battles of all human history. It was a French victory, organized by French genius and won by French soldiers. The British contribution was slight, just as the British numbers were insignificant. It was not due to Belgian resistance, as has been so frequently asserted in the past, and the determining phase was the wonderful fight of Foch at Champenoise, after the Paris army had failed against Kluck. AGAINST RUSSIA The character of the German operations against Russia in the opening days of the war was determined by the decision to attack France. Necessarily all troops save that minimum which represented the barest margin of safety were sent to the west and there was left to a small force the duty of defending the East Prussian marshes. Germany counted upon the slowness of Russian mobilization to give her six weeks of immunity on her eastern frontier. She expected in that time to dispose of France, and she believed that at the end of it Russia would still be engaged in concentrating her masses. Both calculations were wrong. But the main reliance of Germany in the east was Austria, whose whole force, save for one or two corps borrowed by Germany to defend Alsace and four corps sent against Serbia, was available for the invasion of Russian Poland. If Austria could organize a resistance that would last for six weeks, Germany was prepared to do the rest. This she expected of Austria, and again her calculations were wrong. A glance at the map serves to explain the opening moves in the eastern campaign. Russian Poland projects into Austro-German territory, and is nearly encircled by German East Prussia and Austrian Galicia. Russian mobilization had therefore to take place not at the frontier, but behind the Vistula and the armies, once concentrated, advanced from the Niemen, west of Kovno, from Warsaw, from Brest-Litovsk on the Bug and from the Rowno-Dubno-Lutsk fortresses west of Kiev. Thus the military as contrasted with the political frontier of Russia was behind the Vistula, the Niemen and the Bug. The Austro-German plan contemplated a defensive fight on the north, in East Prussia, and an offensive campaign from the south, aimed at Lublin and Brest-Litovsk. The Russians on their side planned an immediate invasion of East Prussia from Warsaw and Kovno and a far more considerable offensive into Galicia from the Rumanian boundary to Rowno. The objective of the northern operation was the conquest of the whole of Prussia east of the Vistula, that of the southern the capture of Lemberg and the conquest of all Galicia. Combined, these two movements would abolish the Polish salient and give the Russian right flank the protection of the Baltic, the left the cover of the Carpathians. Only then could there be any safe advance by the center through Poland upon Posen and Breslau and thence upon Berlin.