" The denouement of August 4th, 1914, when Belgian neutrality was declared a "scrap of paper,"[140] was not the inspiration of a moment, nor a decision arrived at under the pressure of necessity, but the result of years of military preparation and planning.

For if the signs of the times mean anything, they portend, I humbly submit, a somewhat mysterious and mythical denouement to this very age, and to those struggles of it which I have herein attempted, clumsily enough, to sketch.