The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the heart of France.
France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant
still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses--six
hundred thousand casualties--already conscious, icily, of a dwindling
man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged
their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight
eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out
by sledge-hammer blows, left and right, west and east, from that ring
of nations which girdled them. On the west they would stand now on the
defensive, fairly sure of their strength, but well aware that it would
be tried to the utmost by that enemy which, at the back of their
brains (at the back of the narrow brains of those bald-headed vultures
on the German General Staff), they most feared as their future peril--
England. They had been fools to let the British armies grow up and wax
so strong. It was the folly of the madness by which they had flung the
gauntlet down to the souls of proud peoples arrayed against them.
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