If ever a nation has proved to the world that she is devoid of essential military genius, that nation is Germany. Her successful campaign of 1870 was almost entirely due, as we have seen, to the preparations and plans laid down by Stieber and his co-adjutors as well as the fact that France had relied too much upon the traditional ability of the French armies to cope successfully with those of Germany. The same may be said of Germany's "marvellous advance" towards Paris in 1914, which was really a triumph for organised espionage and by no means a proof that military genius was inspiring the movements of the Kaiser's hosts. This organised system of espionage has for some years been in the hands of Major Steinhauer, the present chief of the Berlin Secret Service, and evidently a worthy successor to Stieber. Belgium, as all know who have studied German methods in what has been long known as the "penetration area" of the Netherlands, was so completely in the hands of German spies at the outbreak of the war, that it was only the failure, by a rare miscalculation, of the Berlin military authorities to have forwarded adequate siege-guns to Liège which prevented the Imperial armies marching through the country in a week and reaching France sooner. The entry into the Belgian capital of 700,000 men, without confusion or mishap, has been credited to the military genius of von Kluck and his lieutenants, the fact being entirely overlooked that in view of the inevitable war which Berlin expected to take place before 1915 (as a well-known German newspaper-proprietor told American and Canadian reporters in 1910) the German Secret Service authorities had made an especial appropriation from their funds for the purpose of placing some 8000 spies on the various routes of march between Aix-la-Chapelle and Saint-Quentin. As a result, the very quarters of the various regiments of German invading forces had been marked out for occupation by the Berlin authorities at least two years ahead, while for the purposes of lodging important personages, special hotel managers had been installed several months before August 1914. In Brussels as well as in Paris the city had been so well mapped out that, as American correspondents reported, distinguished officers arriving by rail at the Gare du Nord or the Gare de l'Est gave their instructions as couriers might have done, without doubt or hesitation, to the cabmen at the stations. All these preparations had been made by German fixed agents whose various residences throughout the line of advance bore the familiar caricature of "Kluck's cow." As the event proved in Belgium, such fixed spies had become, from lengthy and normal residence in the various cities, so familiar to Belgian inhabitants that these last supposed them to be either the victims of the German billeting process, or else compulsory agents under the terms of martial law. In Paris matters had been prepared so far in advance that it had been decided to give a representation of Sudermann's _Heimath_ at the Comédie Française, at which the Kaiser and his Staff were to be present. That chronically disappointed potentate was to reside, the German papers of the time declared, at the Élysée, the President's abode, while the procuresses of Paris, mostly Germans, felt, in view of the commissions already distributed in advance among them, emphatically assured that their financial millennium was to arrive with the German Staff. It had even been arranged, by way of a spectacular _revanche_, that the so-called War Lord was to visit the Invalides, where Napoleon's body reposes, and there possess himself of the great soldier's sword, as the Corsican had, in 1806, possessed himself of the sword of Frederick the Great, saying as he took it, "Ceci est à moi"—this is mine. The military set-back was in all probability the least which the Emperor William suffered by his failure to "hit" Paris as a Westerner might put it, seeing that the Kaiser can hardly be called a military man in any practical sense of the term.