TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 259 



command, the prospect would not have been reassuring. Look back 

 and see who won the war ! We know today of a conference held at 

 the palace at Potsdam on July 5, 1914. At that conference were 

 500 junkers and war lords who deliberately planned the raid on 

 civilization that subsequently came. At that conference Germany 

 was attempting to play a lone hand. There was presented a large 

 chart or map of Europe. It began with the Scandinavian peninsula 

 and extended to Constantinople. Near it was another map, and it 

 was a map of the new world. It had a "G" where San Francisco 

 stands and an "A" where Washington stands, and across our fair 

 land was written the word "Germania." One of those military junk- 

 ers, we are told, made a speech in which he gave this slogan : "Three 

 days to Brussels, three weeks to Paris, three months to London, and 

 three years to Washington." And doesn't it almost give you the jim- 

 jams tonight to sit here and reflect how closely they came to carry- 

 ing out that nefarious prophecy? Because, if it hadn't been that 

 that little army of Belgium, outnumbered twenty to one, immolated 

 itself ; if the little country of Belgium had not placed itself upon the 

 sacrificial alter of humanity, they would have been in Brussels in 

 three days. If they had crossed Belgium unopposed, they would 

 have been at Paris in three weeks, because, after they had been held 

 up at Liege for ten days, they came within a stone's throw of Paris 

 at the end of the first month of the war. If France had failed dur- 

 ing the first three weeks of the war and Paris had fallen, and the 

 British ships had been swept from the channel, who doubts but 

 they would have been in London in the period of three months? 

 If in the first half year of the war the continent of Europe had 

 fallen before Prussian power, it requires a mighty little imagina- 

 tion to see that the later chapters of the war would have been 

 vastly different, and we would have had a powerful enemy to fight 

 alone. And so we can go back and safely say that Belgium saved 

 the war ! 



And what about England? When England sent her first 100,000 

 men to stand at the side of France, Germany referred to it as Eng- 

 land's "contemptible little army," and yet one division of that "con- 

 temptible little army" held a front line sector when 70 per cent of 

 its men had fallen. At a later occasion, with their backs against 

 the wall, at terrible cost and for a period of six weeks, fifty-five 

 British divisions held 105 German divisions at bay. Had it not been 

 for the splendid work of the British fleet, it is a question of how 

 much of a factor America could have been in the struggle. And 

 so it can be said that England saved the war ! 



