This new volume on Germany’s conception and practice of war is the work of a neutral, a fact which would alone suffice to secure it our sympathies. Moreover, it is a book which is systematically¹ arranged, based on documentary evidence, serious and obviously sincere, qualities too weighty not to compel the respect not only of the French public, but of all those, to whatever nationality they may belong, who may care to read it or merely to glance through it with an unprejudiced eye.

The author is a Greek, who loves France and who knows her. He knows her because he has lived there; he is not blind to her weak points, but having been early captured by her, he knows the profound mistake into which a stranger falls who is content to judge her by appearances: he has fathomed² the depths of her character and discovered the inexhaustible resources of will and energy concealed³ beneath an apparent, yet much exaggerated, levity⁴. It is for this reason that in the dread⁵ crisis through which she is passing, and from which, as he well knows, she will emerge victorious⁶, he has been willing to fight on our side, at least with the pen. Let us thank him, and may our gratitude⁷ extend beyond him to his noble country, to that Greece whose feelings have long been known to us, who has not changed them, notwithstanding the ebb[vi] and flow of her domestic policy or of transitory influences, and who will not change them, we are convinced: otherwise she would not be Greece.

So much for the author of these pages which we are about to read. When I add that M. Léon Maccas belongs to the best society in Athens: that while still very young he won the degree of doctor of law in his own country by a remarkable⁸ thesis; that he came to us with the intention of pursuing further, thanks to the assistance which we can give him, his studies in international law and diplomatic history, I shall have concluded a very

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