The Battles on the Marne
Tuesday's distant sight of the Germans moving north-west across the
hills above Betz was in reality a side-view of the masterly and rapid
retreat that von Kluck made from the Battles on the Marne. The French
and our own troops were close on his heels; but so skilfully was the
retreat executed that our cavalry was unable to operate effectively,
and the German western armies extricated themselves from our enveloping
movement without severe defeat. They were falling back at express speed
upon the position already selected along the heights behind the Aisne.
On the morning after regaining Paris I ran out through Lagny to Meaux,
to follow up the line of the battles.
Paris, Thursday.
Those have been grim fights round Meaux the last few days. It is no
single battlefield; rather a continuous line of battles. But Chaucotin,
Poincy, Penchard, Chambery, may be remembered in history as the
triangle where the flood was first turned back. The line is marked on
the fields like the waving edge of a past tide on the beach--those
pleasant fields, stubble, meadow, trees, that fall from either side to
the wooded, sheltered river; and among them, caught as in a hollow,
Meaux itself, its cathedral, by some miracle, still unharmed.
The loss has been great, especially on the side of the Germans. The
peasants to-day were shovelling into the long trenches the terrible
harvest of death. All round us was the litter of battle, smashed
muskets, smashed helmets, and broken life.
I could follow the fighting foot by foot from well south of Meaux.
Haystacks torn down and scattered over the field for trusses of
shelter. Haystacks still standing, their north side torn and holed
with shrapnel, with trusses like wings on either side whence the men
had fired. Burnt woods, trees cut down and broken, and the long brown
lines of trenches.
Some of our own men took me round them. Trenches finely made but, in
the hurry, not so finished as those which the Italian workmen, turned
on to this surprising task instead of digging the Metropolitan tunnels,
have made near Paris.
The German trenches were distinguishable by their shape, more hurried,
as of the attacking side. It was possible to follow the story--the
trenches where the shell had burst well behind; the tell-tale breaks
where the Germans had found the range; the trample and dead horses of
cavalry charges.
At Penchard our ---- division had suffered fearfully. Before they fired
a shot the Germans had the range; and the men stood by helplessly or
ran back--those who survived. But the Germans are far on the retreat
now from Penchard!
At Poincy they played yet another trick, and paid for it. Beaten by our
close fire from the trenches--how close I could measure--one in every
three Germans got up and ran back, leaving two or three hidden. Our men
came quickly up, taking no cover. From close range they were swept away
by the unexpected fire. But they came back--with the bayonet! "And,
sir, the Prussians don't like cold steel. But we left them no time to
say so!"
At Chaucotin the peasants were burying many hundred Germans, by the
trenches, in a wastage of swords, muskets, and broken saddles and arms.
And in the distance, beyond the Marne and Ourcq, the battle we could
hear still going on.
In Meaux, as I looked over the bridge, the steam-barges deep in the
green shadow of the river below were moving slowly towards Paris with
yet more wounded. The decks were bright with the blue-red guards.
Even on this side of Meaux overturned wagons, sunken barges, and
the inevitable trenches and piled trusses told of some hours of
the day-long battles. Further forward, on the Ourcq, were torn and
scrambled banks, where, I was told, our cavalry drove the enemy
actually into the canal. Our cavalry has done magnificently.
It was jolly in Meaux to hear good northern English, and English with a
brogue, and to see the confident, bronzed faces. The men are in great
heart. "I have had five weeks out of bed. It's a bit slow here"--this
town was all but deserted--"but it's a lark. We've got 'em!"
Man to man, and against odds, on these fields the British and French
have flung back the weight of the tide.
Beyond Chambery there was yet another sign--a collection of 150 German
wounded, waiting to be brought down. At last we were following an
advance, if only in a small corner of the great field.
Through all the villages along the Marne those who loitered by the
silent closed houses showed holiday faces. Close outside Paris life
seemed to be hardly affected. It came as a surprise, in the sunny
fields, to pass by long, noisy trains of motor-lorries, bearing an
infinite number of names of firms. And longer, slower trains of wagons
with white and dappled grey horses were dragging in captured German
pontoons, splashed with coloured soldiers. Some of these were even
sitting in rope-nooses slung from the projecting beams. About them, the
files of tramping infantry or fretting cavalry.
One of these motor-wagons to-day saved us a shock, and gave us a
spectacle. Taking a wrong turn, which we followed, it ran down a steep
road to Esbly, and, just ahead of us, shot over the edge of an exploded
bridge into the river. The driver got out by jumping in time. The
village was quite deserted.
In war time there are only a few through routes left open. The rest
are torn up or blocked. Every exit from a town, except one or two, is
barricaded with piles of trees, stone-sacks, logs, hoardings, wire, and
earth. In some cases the loose structures threaten more danger to the
defenders. The through routes left are broken up at intervals by walls
and pits, mazes through which one winds precariously. The barricades
are held by stern soldiers. But the army of Paris has admirable manners.
Probably few civilians in this war will be able to see the "Military
Zone" of Paris. Yet it is a wonderful sight. Twice I ran through it
to-day. Vast grounds, with horses exercising, ridden by grey soldiers.
Huge parks of guns, guarded by blue soldiers. Immense enclosures of
cattle. Lines of stacks; stores of forage of all sorts; acres of
wagons; sprinkled with soldiers of many colours.
And all this passes, in one form or another, across those few miles of
sunshine and fields, to the dry-looking brown trenches, the trampled
roads and tattered-looking trees and stacks, and at last to the
terrible remnants of the short human tragedy, that lie for a while
among the furrows and then for ever beneath them.
In a few months these battlefields which I traversed to-day may be
part, if a small part, of history. The muskets we helped to carry back,
packed among a few refugee peasants, may be in museums of honour.
To most of the men who died there, and made the names of these fields
famous, their names were unknown. But for those who see them still
only as ruined, littered fields, it is the dead, whose names will be
forgotten, who alone are present in thought.
Meanwhile the troops are progressing up the Marne. Our soldiers are in
fine fettle. For the moment at least there is respite from tension. As
I came back, away from the faint sound of guns, through the heart of a
thunderstorm, the clouds broke in glorious wet mists of golden sunshine
over Paris.
Lagny, Friday.
Official reports to-day say that the Germans have fallen back nearly
forty miles from their furthest point of advance at Coulommiers. Also,
that the British force has crossed the Marne between La Ferté and
Chateau Thierry, and that the Prussian Guard has been rolled back upon
the marshes of Gond.
In so far as it goes this is correct, but the news is at least two,
probably three, days old. The German right is retiring north and
east, upon Rheims, Oulchy-le-Chateau and Compiègne. The British
forces, upon whom has fallen the brunt of the fighting at this vital
angle, one formed by the French line south-east from Senlis and
Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, and continued by the British north-east to
Chateau Thierry, have succeeded in straightening the line, and thus
eliminating the angle that gave us anxiety at the beginning of the
battle.
It was the beginnings of the German retirement that I identified, when
I approached from the north of Nanteuil three days ago. Its serious
character is confirmed by what I have seen these last days from the
south.
Starting from the north of Meaux to-day I recrossed the great bend of
the Marne, by the help of a cattle barge that just held out for the
crossing. It was doubtful what army we might find beyond.
It soon became evident that our official news was well behind the
actual advance. Cannon were audible from the east-north-east. Near
Torcy the battle was evidently going on.
Here and there, especially along the line of the Ourcq, were the signs
of the progress of the week's battle of nations. The double lines of
opposing trenches, hasty and scamped on the north (the German's).
Torn-down stacks and stooks. Boughs and trees hacked down, across
paths, or on the open roads. Branches lying in open mid-field,
evidently carried forward as cover, and dropped for the final rush.
Trees and stacks still smoking and black with fire.
A few peasants, with their carts standing by, were at the grim labour
of interring the dead; charring the horses with fire before dragging
them into the holes. Broken harness and accoutrements lay in little
heaps, for removal. The old peasant women, with their brown, immobile
faces tied round with coloured handkerchiefs, sat in the carts or
helped. It is a grim task for many reasons; but the kindly rain has
come to help. Bad for the men ahead of us, this rain, it will be
worse for the Germans, in a hostile country, with more limited means
of protection or remedy to be obtained from their base. And fever is
beginning.
The peasants could naturally give little information as to the
regiments or happenings. Only the broad facts could be followed. Near
Ocquere, the ruts of advance and retirement of the German batteries,
a shattered gun marking the firing position. East of Cocherel a
mitrailleuse car, overturned, too broken up to be worth capture. But a
couple of cheerful R.A. mechanics were at work on it, hopefully.
Round a much-perforated cottage, just to the north of St. Aulde, a
fierce fight must have taken place. The furniture had been dragged out
as cover, and on the summit of a trench, a hollow scraped in the hard
soil, stood a large china crock, evidently set there by some cheerful
trooper in derision of the German rifle-fire.
The sound of firing grew heavier towards Torcy, to our north-east,
during the afternoon. Clearly a great battle was in progress.
Impossible to approach nearer. We were already between our line in
action and the French reserves who were holding the country behind, and
forwarding up lines of munition wagons and supplies.
There were wounded in the cottages, the jetsam of the battle in front.
But the line of the British communications was to our east, towards the
Marne at Charly. We could get no news of the happenings in front. We
were constantly challenged, constantly headed to the rear in some new
direction. The men who passed us had the "battle look," the look on the
face of Michael Angelo's "Dawn." I had enough to do to look after the
personal factor in such an atmosphere.
And now we know what was going on there, across those little
tributaries of the Clignon, at Torcy, a few blocked miles ahead. A
thousand prisoners! Fifteen guns or more! The Germans fairly matched
and beaten!
This has been no mere "blind," this rolling up of the German right,
which we have watched with such anxiety. If their right was weakened,
as I assume, to reinforce the armies in Prussia, they have paid for it.
For they have lost, and lost heavily and badly; and at the corner, and
against the little army which it was their desperate concern to break
and overwhelm.
All I could conclude, as we forced our way back, was that the day was
not against us. The movement of men was forward. The strange telepathic
current that runs through villages long before reports reach them, was
all of relief. It was cheerful soldiers in blue who shoved my car on
to the water-logged barge on the Marne; and, after a drift downward
during which we scarcely breathed, it was laughing peasants who pulled
us up on the far bank.
It is something to have been at least across the Marne and near on
such a day, to have had the sound of those guns in one's ears, to have
watched for the first time in five weeks' campaigning the forward
movement of our armies.
* * * * *
The next morning, as soon as the barriers would let me pass, I was
out again in pursuit of the receding armies. Day by day these flights
became longer, and as the first glow of victory after the Marne battles
passed into the deadly quietude of the long death grapple on the
Aisne, day by day the difficulties of approaching the front increased.
The easy smiling soldiers became again suspicious, and the constant
challenges and "arrests" more numerous.
Saturday, with the pursuit.
North through Neufchelles again, and all but on to the banks of the
Aisne. I had to leave the car, because of vanished bridges, and get
forward north and west on foot. I was blocked at last in the heart of
an advancing column, resting in a half burned village.
The shells were bursting on the far side of the slopes. The French
forces were coming up, and were dispersing as they arrived over the
fields, distributing to the scattered positions. Far from our right
and ahead there came the fainter sound of the guns of the British
contingents, continuing the forward movement. They have advanced far
since I approached behind their successful battle at Torcy. (This
Torcy, on the Clignon, should not be confused with Torcy near Lagny,
south of the Marne.) Occasionally, from the remote north-west, I
thought I heard the echo of the same sound coming down the wind. If
this were so, could it be that much desired enveloping movement from
the west?
A few prisoners passed in carts. All with the herded, hunted, pallid
look of frightened and exhausted men. Think of their start for this
great march a few weeks back, amid the shouting and flags, and to the
sound of the perpetual vaunting, foolish processional--"Deutschland,
Deutschland über alles!" And now, lucky to escape the squalid wayside
grave, the little raw brown mounds all over the fields. One or two,
in the grey tunic, with the colourless face and the bare head of the
prisoner, were hanging on to French officers' motors, acting as grooms
or mechanics.
Some men of the ---- Regiment, carried in the car, told me they had not
slept for two nights and days, though they joked heartily enough! It
was not therefore a surprise to see a number more dead asleep under a
shanty. I walked past two, who lay a little apart. One stirred in his
sleep on the stones. The other was dead. But death is now too common a
shadow in this deadly mist of war, that drives and condenses in trench
and grave-mound over the sunlit fields, to call for notice.
A little group of English artillery formed another break in the
monotony of fighting. They were preparing for the reception of fifteen
hundred German horses just captured. Concerned only with the care
and cure of their sick charges, they had no thought for the noise,
turmoil, and incident of war about them. Give the trained man his own
job, and he will see the world fall about him with only an absent
glance!
Further to the east I was shown the site of a curious incident. Some
deep German trenches ran down a slope from the road to a wooded hollow.
Here some thirty rearguard Germans had been captured. "We should have
had 'em all, all the eighty, but the colonel was too kindhearted! He
got one of our guns round and up there through that wood, just to sweep
them trenches. And then he rode forward alone to ask 'em to surrender,
some of them still firing at him! And most of them crept out there by
the cross trench into the road again, and got away behind the rearguard
lot. You see how? And one of the beggars we got had a gold watch; and
the colonel wouldn't have us take it away from him!"
The conviction grew stronger and stronger, as I followed the lines of
gradually accelerating retreat and obviously slackening defence, that
cavalry, cavalry, is what we want to give the tired enemy no rest, and
prevent them reforming upon the supports that are being hurried from
Berlin again on to this wing. Our own cavalry has done magnificently
this campaign, and saved the critical days of retreat from Mons. If
only they have been sufficiently rested and reinforced!
The French cavalry does not seem to have been always fortunate. It has
too often timed its brilliant charges too late, and only swept over a
crest when the German guns had got the range and could mow them down.
Hence their support has not always been available at the right moment.
But their courage and dash have been characteristic. Under a rocky
knoll in a sloping cornfield which I passed on my return the line of
one of these costly charges was only too clearly marked.
South, towards Lizy, a few peasants in carts were already dribbling
back to their looted villages. The Prussians were here for a week or
so and fought in the streets, using the furniture as obstacles. The
destruction is pitiable. The châteaux were in many cases pillaged.
Their gardens are strewn with bottles. The lawns are heaped with
bolsters and palliasses. In one château, near Lizy, the orchard wall
and trees were pierced and wrecked with shells in some prolonged
assault, while over the opposite wall, commanding the deep little green
lane alongside, a splendid mass of scarlet and orange lilies still
glows triumphantly from the deserted garden.
In one such devastated village, between Meaux and May, a strange
incident checked us. A dignified old peasant, wandering in the
wreckage, was pouring out to me a passionate recital of wrongs. A
son shot, a farm wasted, ruin before him. There passed a uniformed
Government employee, with a dangerous, nervous face, who called out:
"Be silent! The French have done us more harm than the Germans!" At
such a time, in such a place, it was an insane outcry. Never have I
heard such a torrent of execration as when the old peasant turned and
sprang at him. Nothing but the vicious look and gestures of the younger
man kept murder from being done. The incident was illustrative of the
unbalanced mental condition to which war reduces the non-combatant.
The younger man was himself ruined, and like a desperate, snarling
fox he turned to hurt the nearest sentient thing, his more injured
neighbour.
In torrents of evening rain I left the battle still continuing beyond
the hill, and the two German armies being edged north-west through the
forests of Villers and Compiègne, already in part behind the line of
Soissons. So, back through the country north of the Canal of Ourcq. A
few days ago it was in German occupation; now comfortably patrolled by
Cuirassiers, in their rain cloaks; with watch-dog camps of infantrymen,
cooking under straw shelters, cheerful and singing for all the torrents
of rain and chilly wind. I am writing on an earth mound, on the wrong
side of the Ourcq Canal. Some fifty sappers are hurriedly trying to
repair the temporary bridge which we crossed this morning. It was frail
then. Since then a huge lorry has gone through it. Eighty more of the
great Paris omnibuses, now loaded with provisions, are waiting on
the far side. It will never carry their weight, and we must get over
first. We have done our share of work on the bridge, to earn an early
passage. In the next field some soldiers are digging out the airman
from under a fallen biplane.
The country has turned from a sunlight green to a dull grey with the
passing of the summer; and there is an autumn mist of twilight heavy
over the forests where the Great Machine is threatening to dissolve
into its human elements, and confess its human limitations.
The feet in the proud Prussian parade to Paris are slipping, slipping,
on the road.
Sunday.
Von Kluck's and Von Buelow's armies are still in full retreat;
separated from the army of the Prince of Wurtemberg, with which they
made a fragile connection by means of the Guard. The Guard themselves
are perilously thrown back into the marshes of St. Gond.
This is the real thing. The men are fighting more feebly; the machine
has become human; the cavalry horses--no longer the fine spirited Irish
stock I had myself to dodge in Belgium a few weeks back--are worn
out. It is pitiable to see the tired beasts loose and useless in the
fields, or dead skeletons by the roads.
But the retreat has been fiercely contested. I followed to-day the
line of the battles north from Meaux, passing by those of which I have
previously written; guided by the forward movement of troops and the
traces of the retreating armies.
The retreat here roughly follows the line of the Ourcq. The battle
has been fought with the French in desperate rearguard actions, at
Vareddes, May, Beauval, Neufchelles. But nowhere can it be said an
engagement began or ended. All along the road and through the adjoining
fields it is the same terrible story--the trees scarred with shell, and
the road littered with broken boughs: the fields scraped with hurried
trenches: the stacks torn down for cover and holes scooped in their
backs: the stark dead horses of artillery and cavalry lie in scores
over the field and by the roads; and here and there still figures, or
a cluster of figures in the German grey, still reproach the desolating
injustice of war. The cyclists took a leading part in the pursuit,
and scores of broken, charred frames marked where the German artillery
found the range and caught their advance.
At every rise in the road, especially beyond May, more serious defences
had been prepared. Fortifications of earth and squared stones between
trees and bank; and here and there a deep burrow into the bank,
bespeaking the human weakness that sought extra cover. And behind these
earthworks, in the holes they left, lie the still figures. Fresh,
shallow mounds, where the peasants have buried the fallen where they
fell, run along the rim of the hard road itself.
The retreat, as it moved north, became almost a flight. Munition
carts lie overturned, a machine-gun or two wrecked. Beside where the
batteries swept the road, great piles of undischarged shells are still
heaped, abandoned in the rush.
More tragic evidences were the scattered heaps of sleeping blankets,
flung aside as the men were wakened by the rapid surprise pursuit.
Broadcast, bottles and barrels; the Prussians, for want of food, seem
to have looted the villages for drink. It was the same in Belgium.
A pitiable piano, with the works shot away, stood in a field, with
a dead man and dog beside it. The instantaneous stillness of a past
battlefield is its deepest impression. Every grim vestige is suggestive
of violent movement and sound, but it is all snatched into silence.
As I advanced, the long lines of wagons were still pouring up with
troops and munition; happier now, and confident. The cannon sounded
ahead from just over the fields, where the Germans have been forced
back on the Aisne. I discharged a load of troopers and guns, and
waited, listening to the thunder across the hill. It is more restful
work. We have them! A few prisoners drove past us, blanched with
nervousness and hunger. The wounded were being carted past to the Red
Cross cottages. And still the flood of French supports is coming up.
From Crecy to Villers, from Villers almost to the Aisne, I have
followed them now some thirty miles and more of savage fighting, of
hurried retreat.
Monday.
Northward, northward! and now to the east; escaping one fatal trap by
a most skilful movement of tired men, but beginning in humbler fashion
to retread the wasted fields of the proud parade from the frontier. So
swift, it is difficult to keep in touch with their retreat. Oho! this
is a different business to fleeing before their lightning march across
Belgium.
And they are different men to meet, the stragglers and prisoners of the
harried army, to the perfect equipage of war I watched coming over the
hills, triumphant, into helpless Brussels. Weary, anxious men, scarcely
human, with mask-like faces.
But you would steel your heart if you could follow the tracks of their
arrogant progress and vengeful retreat. If you saw the deserted,
ravaged villages, heaped with the remnants of the poor man's bare
necessities. If you passed through the tainted atmosphere of the
countless battlefields, that makes a sick offence of a country of
prosperous peace.
I came from the west into Senlis to-day, a day after its evacuation by
the Germans. A detour took me through the Forest of Ermenonville; the
beautiful pine and heather glades and wide lakes haunted by memories of
the humanist philosopher, Rousseau. It is haunted now by other ghosts.
Impossible to suggest the eerie sensation of passing in utter silence
through the village and forest spaces. Not a soul to be seen. Not a
sound. But jettisoned along the road the dissolute debris of a vanished
army. The woods cut for hurried defences. The houses wantonly broken
and looted; and myriads of bottles, from the pillaged wine that served
for food.
The desolation and silence prepared me for a shock. And it came.
Senlis, Senlis of history, with its exquisite tower of open stone-work
and frame of romantic beauty, is a wasted ruin.
As I moved up the deserted streets, for a moment I was deceived.
But every house, as I looked into it, was a shell; burnt out,
skeleton-like, staring at the sky. Fire, and pillage, and ruin. And why?
The French soldiers held the last houses with effective fire. Then, for
ten days the Germans held the town; and destroyed it, for amusement!
The Mayor and other elderly burgesses were set in front of the hotel,
in single file, and shot with a single discharge, for practice. They
were not allowed to speak to their wives and children, who stood by.
Proud of the fact, the General and his aide-de-camp have signed their
names large in the hotel book--may they be kept, for execration!
The hostess of the hotel was forced to open every room, with a pistol
held at her throat. The two old maid-servants who had stayed to look
after the "great house"--now a smoking shell--were abused and injured.
One wanders half an idiot in the village, still weeping.
Eighteen hundred bottles of champagne--they would have no other
wine--were looted from the cellars. Double them, and you will not be
able to account for the ankle-deep litter of glass in the streets.
Hardly a house of importance is left with roof or floor. And how do you
think it was done? Straw was piled. The tapers were stolen from the
shrines and cathedral, and the soldiers amused themselves by throwing
the lighted candles in at the windows of the houses. No wonder the
small, crêpe-covered population is all in the streets. Here and there I
saw a woman scraping in the burnt ashes, to clear a kitchen hearth, or
look for some remnants. The station is a bleak ruin. Only the Cathedral
tower, exquisite and light, protests against the sunlit sky.
But they were finely caught. The Zouaves, Chasseurs d'Afrique, who are
pouring up through this country, arrived in trains of taxi-cabs between
four and five a.m. The officer--no matter how he was occupied--fled
out in his shirt; could not find his regiment; and was shot. The rest
decamped--those who escaped. The prisoners I saw being sent back.
Not a crust is left in the neighbouring villages. At Mont l'Evigne the
few surviving men snarled at the mention of bread.
You will hear with the less revolt of the horror I passed earlier
in the day--some two hundred and forty Prussians, dead in one farm
together, black and unburied, for want of peasants to bury them. They
were killed by shell-fumes possibly, but had been bayoneted for double
security.
It would be easy to amplify the details--the utter destruction of
the houses, the stories of the insolence of the invading horde. The
inhabitants, poor folk! are taking it with the quiet, deep indignation
of a civilised people. Wagons of the wounded, of the American
ambulance, passed in long train through the town, back from the front.
It was a relief to escape again into the broad green drives of the
forest of Compiègne; to see only the abandoned German lorries, the
scattered brown graves in the fields, where the horde were hunted back.
In the forest we passed through miles of fierce brown Turcos, marching
and resting. Their gorgeous colours and turbans, and fierce faces, a
strange contrast to the deep shadowy avenues of the green forest. It
was a greater satisfaction to follow the pursuit; to be the first from
the outside world to greet the oppressed villagers and townsfolk; to
hear in Compiègne the welcome "des Anglais!"; to listen to the women
disputing whether "the Crown Prince" had really been there, and if it
was he who escaped in half a uniform, and shot the French Dragoon
officer (who is lying in the hospital), when his pursuing cavalry
arrived almost in time to save the bridge.
We followed them back, by the Oise, to the Aisne. The ambulances of
our wounded kept on passing us. The fresh troops poured up in pursuit.
But "one can breathe again now" was the word of the day, in village
and town. We were barely an hour or two behind that hurried retreat.
And there was no fighting. They had not stopped, or combined, to fight
again--yet.
Paris, Tuesday.
As an instance of the working of the Machine the retreat of the German
western army, with tired troops, has been almost as remarkable a feat
as the great advance.
The hammer-blow at Paris was attempted, and checked as it fell. The
second concentration of strength was launched on the west centre of
the Allies' line. It only just failed, after a five days' struggle of
almost superhuman magnitude. And now with lightning-like celerity the
failure has been recognised, the strings of the armies drawn tight,
and the retreat accomplished with remarkable precision and pace.
At first the pursuit had to be conducted with forces almost as
exhausted--men who had carried through the tremendous task of fighting
a retreating battle for ten days, of converting it into victory and
advance, and of then flinging themselves into the very different
attitude of mind, and of manœuvre, demanded by rapid pursuit of a still
unrouted enemy.
I have been out again to-day in the attempt to catch up with the march
of return. The broken bridges, the abandoned wagons and munition, the
stragglers, all speak of the precipitance of the northern-eastern
wheel. The captured guns and mitrailleuses were being run back into
Paris. The peasants and spectators' carts were loaded up with German
trophies--undischarged shells, in their wicker cases. The ambulance
wagons still passed, fetching in the wounded of both sides from the
cottages, and even a few of to-day's fighting. But the provision for
ambulance has proved altogether insufficient for the casualties.
The Germans have retreated upon a line of concentration where the
armies of Von Kluck, Von Buelow and Wurtemberg can unite and present
a new front, formidable enough to secure them the necessary rest for
re-formation.
They never contemplated a halt south of the Aisne. It is beyond the
river, on the Soisson-Rheims and Soissons-Compiègne curves, that their
precautionary trenches were prepared.
Nothing gives a more definite idea of their own recognition of
temporary defeat than the sight of their nearer trenches--abandoned
without ever being used. The small wrinkle of earth and sods, with
the spoon-shaped scoop for a single man behind, that they have taken
to making for the retreat. Not so often as before the more elaborate
continuous trench for a mass of men. They have learned a little of
"open" fighting.
But they have hastened past them unused.
The Turcos and Zouaves are pouring up this line in great heart and
hope. But the march is fatiguing, the roads heavier after rain.
In the villages and towns, Haramont, Coeuvres, and others, the folk
cluster round, stoic as ever, but easily smiling, hardly yet realising
their release after the fortnight or more of terrifying oppression. In
many cases they have been well used. The requisitions and regulations
have been only those inevitable, from an invading army in hostile
territory.
One curious but unimportant little coincidence in a day in which there
is no great action to report: A week ago, I mentioned a curious scene
in Beauvais, when through the silent, desolate town suddenly echoed
the continuous blare of a horn, and a motor with two Prussian officers
flashed through. Ten minutes later another car passed us on the
outskirts of the town. This contained two other Germans, but this time
prisoners under guard being carried back to Rouen. The cars did not
meet! The first car had an odd coloured wheel. Near Longport to-day I
saw it again, wrecked by the roadside, the odd wheel high in the air.
As I looked out from the trees on the edge of the high plateau, the
flat green valley of the Aisne looked untenanted, peaceful. For the
present our cavalry have been naturally not in much better condition
than the Germans. We have been unable to surround or outmarch to an
extent that could convert repulse into serious defeat. They are far
enough away, at any rate, to reassure Paris. "Plus à Paris--plus à
Paris!" It is almost a tragic picture now--that of William II. watching
on the hill by Nancy, in his white cloak and silver helmet; the man
who has been swayed by every psychic wave, romantic, religious,
military, until he has brought an Empire tottering to the brink of
ruin. Lohengrin above Babylon: the self-chosen emissary of an imagined
providence looking out on the mirage of his promised land.