"The puzzle is why [France's] heavy losses did not lead to a complete collapse - as had happened in 1870 and would happen again in 1940. Some credit must certainly go to the imperturbable French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre, and particularly to his ruthless purge of senescent or incompetent French commanders as the crisis unfolded. Fundamentally, however, time was against Moltke for the simple reason that the French could redeploy more swiftly than the Germans could advance once they had left their troop trains. On August 23 the three German armies on Moltke's right wing constituted twenty-four divisions, facing just seventeen and a half Entente divisions; by September 6 they were up against forty-one. The chance of a decisive victory was gone, if it had ever existed. At the Marne, the failure of Moltke's gamble was laid bare. He himself suffered a nervous breakdown."
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Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 105
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Younger
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Helmuth von Moltke the Younger
Helmuth Johannes Ludwig Graf von Moltke (25 May 1848 – 18 June 1916), also known as Moltke the Younger, was a German general who served as the Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914. He was a nephew of Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke who is commonly called "Moltke the Elder" to differentiate the two.
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