and, during the
critical days preceding the war, withdrew all troops ten kilometres from
the frontier to prevent a clash. The Germans were obliged, in order to
justify their advance, to invent preposterous tales of bombs dropped by
aeroplanes near Nuremberg or of the violation of Belgium neutrality by
French officers in automobiles. France had no idea of invading Belgium.
All the French strategic plans aimed at the protection of the direct
frontier, and they were dislocated by the dishonest move of Germany
through Belgium.

In 1914 France was not even prepared for war. The pacification of
Morocco immobilized thousands of her troops. Revelations in Parliament
as late as July 13 showed, as mentioned above, great deficiencies in
equipment. Public attention was taken up by the Caillaux trial and by
political strife apparently reaching the proportions of national
weakness.

Since Agadir it is true that France, conscious of the constantly
provocative attitude of Germany, had seen the folly of plans for
disarmament. Love for the army had grown again, through realization of
its necessity. But no nation ever looked forward with more horror and
dread to military conflict than the French. They had been the last
victims of a great European war, of which the memories were still alive.
However much the loss of Alsace-Lorraine rankled in their hearts, they
knew too well the madness of war to seek it again. A new generation had
grown up reconciled to fate and willing to let bygones be bygones.

But Germany would not. The new Empire, a _Bourgeois gentilhomme_ among
nations, but without even the breeding of the _parvenu_, dreamed of
world-supremacy. As the boor in society makes himself conspicuous, so it
was one of the tenets of Pan-Germanism to let no international agreement
take place without German interference.

Some people, reading the annals of forty-four years since the
Franco-Prussian War, have been disposed to sneer at France. Some have
called the country degenerate because of its small birth-rate, its
fiction sometimes brutal, sometimes neurotic, its inefficient
Parliament, its vindictive political and religious contests. Such
critics should remember that the French Government is the result of
tactical compromise in presence of the Monarchical Party. Nobody denies
that it might be improved. As to religious persecution, Americans might
remember their own righteous feelings toward fellow citizens with
"hyphenated" allegianc