Among the people of the United States and Great Britain it was unbelievable that any group of responsible rulers would deliberately plot, in the twentieth century, the enslaving of the world through military force, as we now know that the war lords of Prussia and Austria planned it.  However, the plot was not only made but was almost successful.  They made, though, a great mistake in the case of England.  They were sure that she would not enter the war.  Her turn was to come later on, after France and Russia had been crushed.  The German leaders were also mistaken in calculating the time that Russia would take to mobilize her troops.  In 1904, at the outbreak of the war against Japan, the Russian soldiers had become so drunk that it was many weeks before they could be gotten into any kind of military shape.  But at the outbreak of the great “world-war” the order of the Czar which stopped the sale of strong drink changed all of Prussia’s plans.  Instead of taking two or three months to assemble her army, Russia had her troops marching in a mighty force through the German province of East Prussia three weeks after the war had opened.  The result was that the German soldiers had to be sent back from northern France to stop the victorious march of the Slavs.  The battle of the Marne, fought in the first week of September, 1914, decided the fate of the world.  It hung in the balance long enough to prove that a small addition to the forces on either side might have made all the difference in the world in the final outcome.  The little British army, which was less than one-eighth of the force of the Allied side, probably furnished the factor that defeated the Germans.  The presence in the battle of the German troops who had been withdrawn to stop the Russians, might have given victory to the invaders.

Germany made a mistake, also, in expecting Italy to join in the attack on France.  Any one of these three factors might have won the war in short order for the forces of Austria and Germany.  With France crushed, as she might have been, in spite of her heroic resistance, without the help of the tiny British army, or with the intervention of Italy on the side of her former allies, it would have been no difficult task for the combined forces of Germany and Austria to pound the vast Russian armies into confusion, collect a big indemnity from both France and Russia, and be back home, as the Kaiser had promised, before the leaves fell from the trees.

As has been said, the great majority of the citizens in nations where the people rule, could not believe that in this day and age the rulers of any civilized country would deliberately plot robbery and piracy on so grand a scale.  They had looked forward to the time when all nations might disarm and live in peace with their neighbors.  In France alone, of all the western nations, was there any clear idea of the Prussian plan.  France, having learned the temper of the Prussian war lords in 1870, France, burdened by a national debt heaped high by the big indemnity collected by the Germans in ’71, looked in apprehension to the east and leaped to arms at the first rattling of the Prussian saber.