242 The Great War bringing them up he seemed unmistakably to have crushed Austrian military strength, and there was left only Germany to meet Allied might in the long feared " war of the two fronts." If the first month, the " first round " had been to the Germans; was it less unmistakable on October 4 that the second had been to the Allies? But Ger- man statesmen, themselves, in justifying their viola- tion of Belgian neutrality, had, in effect, confessed that to win at all Germany must triumph in the first weeks, win, not tactically but decisively, crush, an- nihilate the military strength of France; hold Paris and the Republic to ransom, as a hostage, while vic- torious western armies flowed back to the Niemen to deal with the armies of the Czar. Yet on October 4 it was Allied, not German, armies that were advancing in France. As on September 4 the world was talking of the fall of Paris, so on October 4 it was the probable approach of German retreat from France which occupied the attention not alone of Allies but of neutral observers. The expectations of the earlier month had proved false, those of October might be equally unwar- ranted. Yet, not even In German official and un- official utterances was there longer the promise of victory that should terminate the western war. What had opened as a daring, magnificent, un- rivalled effort to end a war in the first weeks of con- flict with a brief and irresistible drive, had fallen now to the level of a mere campaign, in size, in ex-