more to them at this stage of the war than the annihilation of an army corps.  It would have been a moral debacle for the French people, who had been buoyed up with false news and false hopes until their Government had fled to Bordeaux, realizing the gravity of the peril.  The Terrible Year would have seemed no worse than this swift invasion of Paris, and the temperament of the nation, in spite of the renewal of its youth, had not changed enough to resist this calamity with utter stoicism.  I know the arguments of the strategists, who point out that Von Kluck could not afford to undertake the risk of entering Paris while an undefeated army remained on his flank.  They are obvious arguments, thoroughly sound to men who play for safety, but all records of great captains of war prove that at a decisive moment they abandon the safe and obvious game for a master-stroke of audacity, counting the risks and taking them, and striking terror into the hearts of their enemy by the very shock of their contempt for caution.  Von Kluck could have entered and held Paris with twenty thousand men.  That seems to me beyond dispute by anyone who knows the facts.  With the mass of men at his disposal he could have driven a wedge between Paris and the French armies of the left and centre, and any attempt on their part to pierce his line and cut his communications would have been hampered by the deadly peril of finding themselves outflanked by the German centre swinging down from the north in a western curve, with its point directed also upon Paris.  The whole aspect of the war would have been changed, and there would have been great strategical movements perilous to both sides, instead of the siege war of the trenches in which both sides played for safety and established for many months a position bordering upon stalemate.

The psychological effect upon the German army if Paris had been taken would have been great in moral value to them as in moral loss to the French.  Their spirits would have been exalted as much as the French spirits would have drooped, and even in modern war victory is secured as much by temperamental qualities as by shell-fire and big guns.

The Headquarters Staff of the German army decided otherwise.  Scared by the possibility of having their left wing smashed back to the west between Paris and the sea, with their communications cut, they swung round steadily to the south-east and drove their famous wedge-like formation southwards, with the purpose of dividing the allied forces of the West from the French centre.  The exact position then was this:  Their own right struck down to the south-east of Paris, through Chateau Thierry to La Ferte-sous-Jouarre and beyond; and another strong column forced the French to evacuate Rheims and fall back in a south-westerly direction.  It was not without skill, this sudden change of plan, and it is clear that the German Staff believed it possible to defeat the French centre and left centre and then to come back with a smashing