of their opponents.  In the “Victorian” war that ended in the middle of September, 1914, they delivered their blow, they over-reached, they were successfully counter-attacked on the Marne, and then abruptly—­almost unfairly it seemed to the British sportsmanlike conceptions—­they shifted to the game played according to the very latest rules of 1914.  The war did not come up to date until the battle of the Aisne.  With that the second act of the great drama began.

I do not believe that the Germans ever thought it would come up to date so soon.  I believe they thought that they would hustle the French out of Paris, come right up to the Channel at Calais before the end of 1914, and then entrench, produce the submarine attack and the Zeppelins against England, working from Calais as a base, and that they would end the war before the spring of 1915—­with the Allies still a good fifteen years behindhand.

I believe the battle of the Marne was the decisive battle of the war, in that it shattered this plan, and that the rest of the 1914 fighting was Germany’s attempt to reconstruct their broken scheme in the face of an enemy who was continually getting more and more nearly up to date with the fighting.  By December, Bloch, who had seemed utterly discredited in August, was justified up to the hilt.  The world was entrenched at his feet.  By May the lagging military science of the British had so far overtaken events as to realise that shrapnel was no longer so important as high explosive, and within a year the significance of machine guns, a significance thoroughly ventilated by imaginative writers fifteen years before, was being grasped by the conservative but by no means inadaptable leaders of Britain.

The war since that first attempt—­admirably planned and altogether justifiable (from a military point of view, I mean)—­of Germany to “rush” a victory, has consisted almost entirely of failures on both sides either to get round or through or over the situation foretold by Bloch.  There has been only one marked success, the German success in Poland due to the failure of the Russian munitions.  Then for a time the war in the East was mobile and precarious while the Russians retreated to their present positions, and the Germans pursued and tried to surround them.  That was a lapse into the pre-Bloch style.  Now the Russians are again entrenched, their supplies are restored, the Germans have a lengthened line of supplies, and Bloch is back upon his pedestal so far as the Eastern theatre goes.

Bloch has been equally justified in the Anglo-French attempt to get round through Gallipoli.  The forces of the India Office have pushed their way through unprepared country towards Bagdad, and are now entrenching in Mesopotamia, but from the point of view of the main war that is too remote to be considered either getting through or getting round; and so too the losses of the German colonies and the East African War are scarcely to be reckoned with in the main war.  They have no determining value.  There remains the Balkan struggle.  But the Balkan struggle is something else; it is something new.  It must be treated separately.  It is a war of treacheries and brags and appearances.  It is not a part of, it is a sequence to, the deadlock war of 1915.