Between Montreux Vieux and Pfetterhausen there is a little French village called Suarce, which, on the very eve of the war, was the scene of an incident almost as dramatic from a historical point of view as the violation of Belgium two days later. At the end of July, for some days before the war began, the French had withdrawn their troops to a distance of six miles from the frontier all along the line from Luxembourg to the point, a mile from Pfetterhausen, which is the meeting-place of the boundaries of France, Switzerland, and Alsace. They were acting, I believe, partly at the suggestion of the English Government, and certainly with their warm approval. A few frontier posts, consisting chiefly of douaniers and gendarmes, had to be left, but, short of their recall, everything possible was done to remove temptation from the path of swashbuckling Uhlan patrols, and so to diminish the risk of incidents likely to precipitate the declaration of war. Unfortunately, these precautions were thrown away, and were even turned to France’s disadvantage. Before war had begun, Germany had sent a number of small patrols across the frontier with roving commissions, to promote the very incidents which France had tried to avoid. After it was declared, in part of the border district between Metz and Luxembourg, she gained valuable time by the ease with which her troops advanced in the neutral zone which France had created. France, hoping against hope for peace, had played the game: Germany, bent on war, had broken the rules before it began. There were nineteen of these deliberate acts of trespass by armed men on the soil of a friendly power between Longwy and Belfort, twelve of them, on Sunday, August 2nd, in the Belfort district, the rest, either on the Sunday or the Monday, at Cirey and other places further north. The number of them and the wide extent of ground which they covered, were in themselves enough to prove that they were part of a premeditated scheme, and not merely the casual acts of a few irresponsible and excitable individuals. But there were facts about the affair at Suarce which made it different from the others and established beyond question that the German soldiers concerned in it (and therefore in the other eighteen cases) were acting under the orders of their superior officers.