rked the time
that they were indeed a part of something not only necessarily
invincible, but of a different kind in military superiority from other
men.

These, from what would seem every quarter of the globe, had been
gathered to oppose him, merely because the German had challenged his
two principal enemies. Though yet far from being imperilled by so
universal a movement, he crushes it utterly, and in a less time than
it takes for a great nation to realize that it is under arms, he is
overwhelmed by the news not of his enemy's defeat, but rather of his
annihilation. Miles of captured guns and hour upon hour of marching
columns of prisoners are the visible effect of his triumph and the
confirmation of it; and he hears, after the awful noise of his
victories, a sort of silence throughout the world--a silence of awe
and dread, which proclaims him master. It is the anniversary of Sedan.

I do not set down this psychological phenomenon for the mere pleasure
of its description, enormous as that phenomenon is, and worthy of
description as it is. I set it down because I think that only in an
appreciation of it can one understand the future development of the
war. After the Battle of Metz, after the sweep down upon Paris from
the Sambre, after this immense achievement of Tannenberg, the
millioned opinion of a now united North Germany was fixed. It was so
fixed that even a dramatically complete disaster (and the German
armies have suffered none) might still leave the North German unshaken
in his confidence. Defeats would still seem to him but episodes upon a
general background, whose texture was the necessary predominance of
his race above the lesser races of the world. This is the mood we
shall discover in all that Germany does from that moment forward. It
is of the first importance to realize it, because that mood is, so to
speak, the chemical basis of all the reactions that follow. That mood,
disappointed, breeds fury and confusion; in the event of further
slight successes, it breeds a vast exaggeration of such success; in
the presence of any real though but local advance, it breeds the
illusion of a final victory.

It is impossible to set down adequately in these few pages this
intoxication of the first German victories. It must be enough to
recall to the reader that the strange mood with which we have to deal
was also one of a century's growth, a century during which not only in
Germany, but in Scandinavia, in the unive