A Popular History of The Great War/Volume 1/Page 172

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CAMPAIGN IN EAST PRUSSIA


military experts of the world amazed, a success which horrified and shocked the moral conscience of the world. Germany herself was far from blind to the enormity of her action, as is witnessed by the attempts of the kaiser after the fall of Liege to win Belgian neutrality, and by the statements of the German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, in the Reichstag, admitting that Germany was technically wrong and promising full reparation after the war. It is not to be forgotten, however, that Belgium's right to immunity as a small and powerless nation was frankly prejudiced by her possession of such a large slice of Africa as is contained in the Belgian Congo. And in a war whose major origins were undoubtedly- intimately boirnd up with the desires of great powers to expand their colonial possessions within the only territory of the world not already colonised and occupied, it cannot be doubted that Germany's claim for a “place in the sun" and Belgium's possession of the Congo represented two aims which ultimately were bound to conflict.


CHAPTER 9
Campaign in East Prussia


The great army wliich Russia could put in the fieldfSeemed likely in the early days of the war to be a decisive factor. The great Moltke said that Russia had a habit of appearing too late in v/ar and then coming in too strong. In 1914 that view was to be falsified. Russia began mobilization on July 29 and did not complete it until August 24. But, greatly daring, she opened her offensive before mobilization was complete. The German general staff had assumed that they would not have to deal seriously with her until at least a month after the outbreak of war, and they believed that during th;it interval it would be possible to strike such effective blows on the western front as to enable them to divert to the eastern front whatever forces might be necessary to defeat Russia, If Russia had acted entirely upon military reasons dictated by her own interests, it is very likely that this forecast would have been verified. The soundest plan would have been for

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