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 to provide the Serbian army with rifles and artillery, Serbia agreeing to put half a million soldiers in the field. In the same month Russia negotiated a French loan of about $100 million for improvements on her strategic railways and frontier-roads. During the spring, she made "test" mobilizations of large bodies of troops which were never demobilized, and these "test" mobilizations continued down to the outbreak of the war; and in April Russian agents made technical arrangements with agents of the British and French Admiralties for possible combined naval action.

Yes, those eighteen months were very busy months for Russia. True, she came out at the end of them an "unprepared and unsuspecting" nation, presumably, for was not all Europe unprepared and unsuspecting? Is it not so nominated in the Versailles treaty? One can not help wondering, however, how it is that Germany, "carefully, skilfully, insidiously, clandestinely planning in every detail" a murderous attack on the peace of Europe, should have given Russia the inestimable advantage of those eighteen months. [59]