ieve that under the strain of the great
retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude
which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of
which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.

Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the
Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great
effort in the West was already achieved.

They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet
destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up
garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded
and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and
had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They
were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the
reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of
their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left
them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the
insufficient line opposed to them.

[Illustration: Sketch 65.]

They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation
apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced
back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to
its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right
again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow
up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round
which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of
this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the
great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or
west of the Allies--the German right--stood the main army of von
Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had
already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von
Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the
Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in
occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne,
the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing
Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the
first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which
had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a
few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chap