His book was very carefully studied in Germany.  As a humble disciple of Bloch I should have realised this, but I did not, and that failure led me into some unfortunate prophesying at the outbreak of the war.  I judged Germany by the Kaiser, and by the Kaiser-worship which I saw in Berlin.  I thought that he was a theatrical person who would dream of vast massed attacks and tremendous cavalry charges, and that he would lead Germany to be smashed against the Allied defensive in the West, and to be smashed so thoroughly that the war would be over.  I did not properly appreciate the more studious and more thorough Germany that was to fight behind the Kaiser and thrust him aside, the Germany we British fight now, the Ostwald-Krupp Germany of 1915.  That Germany, one may now perceive, had read and thought over and thought out the Bloch problem.

There was also a translation of Bloch into French.  In English a portion of his book was translated for the general reader and published with a preface by the late Mr. W.T.  Stead.  It does not seem to have reached the British military authorities, nor was it published in England with an instructive intention.  As an imaginative work it would have been considered worthless and impracticable.

But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and French frontiers had been properly prepared—­as they should have been prepared when the Germans built their strategic railways—­with trenches and gun emplacements and secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty miles into either France or Belgium.  They would have been held at Liege and in the Ardennes.  Five hundred thousand men would have held them indefinitely.  But the Allies had never worked trench warfare; they were unready for it, Germans knew of their unreadiness, and their unreadiness it is quite clear they calculated.  They did not reckon, it is now clear that they were right in not reckoning, the Allies as contemporary soldiers.  They were going to fight a 1900 army with a 1914 army, and their whole opening scheme was based on the conviction that the Allies would not entrench.

Somebody in those marvellous maxims from the dark ages that seem to form the chief reading of our military experts, said that the army that entrenches is a defeated army.  The silly dictum was repeated and repeated in the English papers after the battle of the Marne.  It shows just where our military science had reached in 1914, namely, to a level a year before Bloch wrote.  So the Allies retreated.

For long weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of Belgium, out of the north of France, and for rather over a month there was a loose mobile war—­as if Bloch had never existed.  The Germans were not fighting the 1914 pattern of war, they were fighting the 1899 pattern of war, in which direct attack, outflanking and so on were still supposed to be possible; they were fighting confident in their overwhelming numbers, in their prepared surprise, in the unthought-out methods