t
aggression there, only seventeen miles from her own border, and with
Metz and Strassburg to back the invading army.

But that there were other opinions, even at Nancy, I happen to know.
For, one day while the war was still new, I chanced in rooting in an
old bookstall in Paris, to find a book which was written by an officer
of the Twentieth Corps, in 1911.[1]

The officer was, if I mistake not, of the artillery, and he wrote this
"forecast" to entertain the members of his mess or battery.

He predicted with amazing accuracy the successive events which happened
nearly three years later, only he "guessed" the order for mobilization
in France to fall on August 14, instead of August 1; and all his
subsequent dates were just about two weeks later than the actualities.
But he "foresaw" the invasion of Belgium, the resistance at Liege and
Namur, the fall of Brussels, the invasion of France by her northeastern
portals. Almost--at the time I read this book--it might have served as
history instead of prophecy. I would that I had it now! But I clearly
remember that it located the final battle of the war in Westphalia,
describing the location exactly. And that it said the Emperor would
perish in that downfall of his empire. And it cited two prophecies
current in Germany--the long-standing one to the effect that Germany's
greatest disaster would come to her under an Emperor with a withered
arm, and one made in Strassburg in 1870, declaring that the new empire
would dissolve under its third Emperor.

The book was published in January, 1912, if I remember rightly, and was
almost immediately translated into German. And I was told that one
hundred thousand copies were sold in Germany in a very short time, and
it was made the subject of editorials in nearly every prominent German
paper.

Probably Foch read it. He may even have discussed it with the author.
But he held to the belief that when the attack came it would come
through Nancy.

He was not, however, expecting it when it came.

[1] The reason I cannot give his name, nor quote directly from his
book, is that a fellow-traveler borrowed the book from me and I have
never seen it since.

XII

ON THE EVE OF WAR

In the first days of July, 1914, divisional maneuvers were held as
usual in Lorraine. Castelnau and Foch reviewed the troops, known
throughout the army as "the division of iron."

A young captain, recently assigned from the School of War to a reg