emental boy-like bearing of
pride in him as he told us the story. If I am right in my dates the
defenses of Maubeuge caved in under the batterings of the German Jack
Johnsons on September sixth and the citadel surrendered September
seventh. On the following day, the eighth, Von Zwehl got word that a
sudden forward thrust of the Allies threatened the German center at
Laon. Without waiting for orders he started to the relief. He had
available only nine thousand troops, all reserves. As many more shortly
re-enforced him. He marched this small army--small, that is, as armies
go these Titan times--for four days and three nights. In the last
twenty-four hours of marching the eighteen thousand covered more than
forty English miles--in the rain. They came on this same plateau, the
one which we now faced, at six o'clock of the morning of September
thirteenth, and within an hour were engaged against double or triple
their number. Von Zwehl held off the enemy until a strengthening force
reached him, and then for three days, with his face to the river and his
back to the hill, he fought.

Out of a total force of forty thousand men he lost eight thousand and
more in killed and wounded, but he saved the German Army from being
split asunder between its shoulder-blades. The enemy in proportion lost
even more than he did, he thought. The General had no English; he told
us all this in German, Von Theobald standing handily by to translate for
him when our own scanty acquaintance with the language left us puzzled.

"We punished them well and they punished us well," he added. "We
captured a group of thirty-one Scotchmen--all who were left out of a
battalion of six hundred and fifty, and there was no commissioned
officer left of that battalion. A sergeant surrendered them to my men.
They fight very well against us--the Scotch."

Since then the groundswell of battle had swept forward, then backward,
until now, as chance would have it, General von Zwehl once more had his
headquarters on the identical spot where he had them four weeks before
during his struggle to keep the German center from being pierced. Then
it had been mainly infantry fighting at close range; now it was the
labored pounding of heavy guns, the pushing ahead of trench-work
preparatory to another pitched battle.

Considering what had taken place here less than a month before the plain
immediately before us seemed peaceful enough.

Nature certainly works migh