risk of defeat, and one in which he might, even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a most burdensome tenacity.  In the practice of the field, the contrast appeared in the French use of a great reserve, and the German contempt for such a precaution:  in the elaborate thinking out of the use of a reserve, which is the core of French military thought; in the superficial treatment of the same, which is perhaps the chief defect of Germany.

It would be of no purpose to debate here which of these two mental attitudes, with all their consequences, is either morally the better or in practice the more successful.  The French and Latin tradition seems to the German pusillanimous, and connected with that decadence which he perceives in every expression of civilization from Athens to Paris.  The modern German conception seems to the French theatrical, divorced from reality, and hence fundamentally weak.  Either critic may be right or either wrong.  Our interest is to follow the particular schemes developing from that tone of mind.  We shall see how, in the first phases of the war, the German conception strikingly justified itself for more than ten days; how, after a fortnight, it was embarrassed by its opponent; and how at the end of a month the German initiative was lost under the success—­only barely achieved after dreadful risk—­of the French plan.

That plan, inherited from the strategy of Napoleon, and designed in particular to achieve the success of a smaller against a larger number, may be most accurately defined as the open strategic square, and its leading principle is “the method of detached reserves.”

This strategic conception, which I shall now describe, and which (in a diagram it is put far too simply) underlies the whole of the complicated movements whereby the French staved off disaster in the first weeks of the war, is one whose whole object it is to permit the inferior number to bring up a locally superior weight against a generally superior enemy in the decisive time and at the decisive place.

Let us suppose that a general commanding twelve large units—­say, twelve army corps—­knows that he is in danger of being attacked by an enemy commanding no less than sixteen similar units.

Let us call the forces of the first or weaker general “White,” and those of the second or stronger general “Black.”

It is manifest that if White were merely to deploy his line and await the advance of Black thus,

[Illustration:  Sketch 21.]

he would be outflanked and beaten; or, in the alternative, Black might mass men against White’s centre and pierce it, for Black is vastly superior to White in numbers.  White, therefore, must adopt some special disposition in order to avoid immediate defeat.

Of such special dispositions one among many is the French Open Strategic Square.

This disposition is as follows:—­