74 The Great War keeping alive the old memory. In the Foreign Le- gion in Africa there were hundreds of Alsatians who left home forever rather than wear the Kaiser's coat. Von Bernhardi, a score of other German commentators, had conceded with surprising frank- ness the success of the French in retaining the affec- tion of her lost children. All these circumstances, a hundred more, com- bined to give to the slight military operations, for it was impossible to regard the skirmishes at Alt- kirch and before Muelhausen as important in them- selves, a real meaning to the world, to the world which, rightly or wrongly, through weakness of mind, or through sentiment which found no warrant in the fact, was roused at the thought of the little red legged soldiers sweeping down the valley of the 111, where once Turenne triumphed, " to redeem " the lost provinces. There is no nobler instance of the arising of a whole people than that of the Germans themselves when in 1813, peasant and poet, soldier and scholar, a whole race sprang to arms to drive Napoleon from the Fatherland. Was it too soon to detect in French and Belgian operations in August something of the same spirit so fatal alike to the strategists and to the military genius of Napoleons?