Here is France's vulnerable point. For France to be now outnumbered in
this theater of the war is strong evidence of her also being
out-generaled. While the French have wasted needless troops in futile
excursions beyond the Vosges and in the Ardennes, they seem to have been
blind to the tremendous concentration of German fighting strength in the
north. Had it not been for the solid, heroic resistance of the British
army under Field-marshal Sir John French, on the extreme French left at
Mons and Cambrai, it is very likely that the French would have sustained
a crushing defeat. That the French should be outnumbered on the lines
near La Fere seems incomprehensible and requires satisfactory
explanation from the Ministry of War. Further proof of this primary
fault is forthcoming in the proclamation issued to-day, calling to the
colors the 1914 class, some two hundred and fifty thousand young men of
twenty, due to join the army in October. Moreover, those classes of the
reserves of the territorial army called up when the general mobilization
order was issued and for some unaccountable reason _actually sent home
again_, have also been recalled.

[Photograph: Copyright by American Press Association. Parisians watching
the German air-craft that drop bombs on the city.]

In broad daylight, at 1.15 this afternoon, the Germans left their first
visiting-card in Paris. This came in the shape of three bombs dropped
from a German aeroplane, that made a curved flight over the city at an
altitude of two thousand meters. The first bomb fell at the corner of
the Rue des Vinaigriers and the Rue du Marais, another in the Rue des
Recollets, and a third near an asylum for aged workmen on the Quai
Valmy. The airman also let fall an oriflamme, two and a half meters
long, bearing the black and white Prussian colors, ballasted by sand in
an india-rubber football, attached to which was a letter, written in