armies are not
mentioned in the Battle of the Marne, and I have not been able to find
out where they were in service.

The First and Second armies, fighting in Lorraine, we know about. They
developed, in that battle, more than one great commander of whose
abilities Joffre hastened to avail himself. On the day he issued that
order commending the First and Second armies, the generalissimo called
Manoury from the Lorraine front, where he had shown conspicuous
leadership, and put him in command of the newly-created Sixth army,
which was to play the leading part in routing Von Kluck. And on the
next day (August 28) Joffre called Foch from Lorraine to head the new
Ninth army, which was to hold the center at the Battle of the Marne and
deal the smashing, decisive blow.

In two days, while his troops were retreating before an apparently
irresistible force, Joffre created two new armies, put at the head of
each a man of magnificent leadership, and intrusted to those two armies
and their leaders the most vital positions in the great battle he was
planning.

The German soldiers facing Joffre were acting on general orders printed
for them eight years before, and under specific orders which had been
worked out by their high command with the particularity of machine
specifications. And all their presumptions were based on the French
doing what Teutons would do in the same circumstances. Their
extra-suspender-button efficiency and preparedness were pitted against
the flexible genius of a man who could assemble his two "shock" armies
in two days and put them under the command of men picked not from the
top of his list of available commanders, but practically from the
bottom.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of Joffre were those which had
sustained the terrific onslaught in the north and had been fighting in
retreat, practically since the beginning.

On August 25 Joffre declared; "We have escaped envelopment"--thanks
largely to the action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians--and,
clearly seeing that he could not hope for favorable results from a
great battle fought in the north, he gave the order for retreat which
meant the abandonment of north-eastern France to the Hunnish hordes.

What anguish that order caused him we shall never know. He realized to
the full what the people of that great, prosperous part of France would
have to suffer. He was aware what the loss of those resources would
mean to the French, and