Chapter X: 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.