Germany made a mistake, also, in expecting Italy to join in the attack on France. Any one of these three factors might have won the war in short order for the forces of Austria and Germany. With France crushed, as she might have been, in spite of her heroic resistance, without the help of the tiny British army, or with the intervention of Italy on the side of her former allies, it would have been no difficult task for the combined forces of Germany and Austria to pound the vast Russian armies into confusion, collect a big indemnity from both France and Russia, and be back home, as the Kaiser had promised, before the leaves fell from the trees. As has been said, the great majority of the citizens in nations where the people rule, could not believe that in this day and age the rulers of any civilized country would deliberately plot robbery and piracy on so grand a scale. They had looked forward to the time when all nations might disarm and live in peace with their neighbors. In France alone, of all the western nations, was there any clear idea of the Prussian plan. France, having learned the temper of the Prussian war lords in 1870, France, burdened by a national debt heaped high by the big indemnity collected by the Germans in ’71, looked in apprehension to the east and leaped to arms at the first rattling of the Prussian saber. Germany, up to 1866 renowned chiefly for her poets, musicians, and thinkers, had since been fed for nearly fifty years upon the doctrine that military force is the only power in the world worth considering. Some of the German people still cling to the high ideals of their ancestors, but the majority had drunk deeply of the wine of conquest and were intoxicated with the idea that Germany’s mission in life was to conquer all the other nations of the world and rule them for their own good by German thoroughness and by German efficiency. It may take many years to stamp this feeling out of the German nation. As they have worshipped force and appealed to force as the settler of all questions, so they will listen to reason only after they have been thoroughly crushed by a superior force. The sufferings brought upon the German nation by the war have had a great effect in making them doubt whether, after all, force is a good thing. As long as the people could be kept enthusiastic through stories of wonderful victories over the Russians, the Serbians, and then the Roumanians, they were contented to endure all manner of hardships.