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soon begin to take part in the action. But when you are dealing with half a dozen army corps--240,000 men--it is quite another matter. The turning of any one of these great bodies through a whole right angle is a lengthy business. You cannot put a quarter of a million men into one column--they would take ages to deploy--so you must, as we have seen, make each unit of them overlap the next before the turn can begin. [Illustration: Sketch 29.] [Illustration: Sketch 30.] Nor is that all the delay involved. It would never do for these six separate corps to come up in driblets and get defeated in detail; 10, 11, and 12 will have to wait until 13, 14, 15, and even 16, have got up abreast of them--and that is the third cause of delay. Here are three causes of delay which, between them and accumulated, have disastrous effect; and in general we may be certain that where very large bodies and very extensive stretches of territory are concerned, that wing of Black which has been left out in the cold can never come up in time to retrieve the situation created by White's twelve pinning Black's engaged wing of only nine. If the square has worked, and if the twelve White have pinned the right-hand wing of Black, 1 to 9 inclusive, there is nothing for Black to do but to order his right wing, 1 to 9, to retreat as fast as possible before superior numbers, and to order his left wing, 10 to 16, to fall back at the same time and keep in line; and you then have the singular spectacle of twelve men compelling the retreat of and pursuing sixteen. _That is exactly what happened in the first three weeks of active operations in the West. The operative corner A in the annexed diagram was the Franco-British force upon the Sambre. The retirement of that operative corner and its holding of the enemy was what is called in this country "The Retreat from Mons." BB are the "masses of manoeuvre" behind A. The swinging up of these masses involving the retirement of the whole was the Battle of the Marne._ [Illustration: Sketch 31.] Now, it is evident that in all this everything depends upon the tenacity and military value of the operative corner, which is exposed and sacrificed that the whole scheme of the Open Square may work. If that operative corner is destroyed as a force--is overwhelmed or dispersed or surrounded--while it is fighting its great odds, the whole square goes to pieces. Its centre is penetrated by the enemy, and the a
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