The immense effort thus made by Germany explains itself very well, if,
having regard to the position of Germany at the opening of the war, one
considers that of the Allies. Germany desired to take advantage of the
circumstances which enabled her to make a simultaneous mobilization of
all her forces--a mobilization which the three allied armies could not
carry out so rapidly. Germany wished with the mass of troops to crush
first of all the adversary who appeared to her the most dangerous. This
effort, broken for the first time on the Marne, attained its maximum at
the moment of the battle of Flanders, in which more than fifty army
corps out of sixty-nine were pitted against the French, British, and
Belgian Armies.
Here also the method followed by Germany is easily comprehensible. At
the end of October the Russian danger was beginning to become pressing,
and it was necessary to win a decisive victory in the western theatre of
the war. It was imperative to give international opinion the impression
that Germany remained in that quarter mistress of operations. Finally,
it behooved her by this victory to gain the freedom to transport a large
number of army corps to Poland. We have seen that the battle of
Flanders, instead of being a success for Germany, was a marked defeat.
This defeat was fraught with results, and it dominates the present
position of the German Army. The plans above described of the German
mobilization, which had their justification in view of a prompt victory,
were calculated to become extremely perilous from the moment that that
victory failed to be gained.