not as yet provided the stores of
artillery and ammunition that were to astonish the world. Nor had Turkey
recovered from the wounds of 1912. Nor was the enlarged Kiel-North Sea
Canal ready. Its opening at Midsummer 1914 created a naval situation far
more favourable to Germany. A year earlier a French naval officer had
prophesied that she would await the opening of the canal before
declaring war[548].

[Footnote 548: _Revue des questions diplomatiques_ (1913), pp. 417-18.]

At Midsummer 1914 the general position was as follows. Germany had
reached the pitch of perfection in armaments, and the Kiel Canal was
open. France was unready, though the three years' service promised to
improve her army. The Russian forces were slowly improving in number and
cohesion. Belgium also, alarmed by the German menace both in Europe and
on the Congo, had in 1912-13 greatly extended the principle of
compulsory service, so that in 1914 she would have more than 200,000 men
available, and by 1926 as many as 340,000. In naval strength it was
unlikely that Germany would catch up Great Britain. But the submarine
promised to make even the most powerful ironclads of doubtful value.

Consequently, Germany and her friends (except perhaps Turkey) could
never hope to have a longer lead over the Entente Powers than in 1914,
at least as regards efficiency and preparedness. Therefore in the eyes
of the military party at Berlin the problem resembled that of 1756,
which Frederick the Great thus stated: "The war was equally certain and
inevitable. It only remained to calculate whether there was more
advantage in deferring it a few months or beginning at once." We know
what followed in 1756--the invasion of neutral Saxony, because she had
not completed her armaments[549]. For William II. in 1914 the case of
Belgium was very similar. She afforded him the shortest way of striking
at his enemy and the richest land for feeding the German forces. That
Prussia had guaranteed Belgian neutrality counted as naught; that in
1912 Lord Haldane had warned him of the hostility of England if he
invaded Belgium was scarcely more important. William, like his ancestor,
acted solely on military considerations. He despised England: for was
she not distracted by fierce party feuds, by Labour troubles, by wild
women, and by what seemed to be the beginnings of civil war in Ireland?
All the able rulers of the House of Hohenzollern have discerned when to
strike and to strike hard