squadron, like the mounted
hordes of Attila, but armed with the deadly weapons of modern
warfare. Their artillery was in enormous numbers, and their columns
advanced under the cover of it, not like an army but rather like a
moving nation. It did not move, however, with equal pressure at all
parts of the line. It formed itself into a battering ram with a pointed
end, and this point was thrust at the heart of the English wing with its
base at St. Quentin, and advanced divisions at Peronne and Ham. It
was impossible to resist this onslaught. If the British forces had stood
against it they would have been crushed and broken. Our gunners
were magnificent, and shelled the advancing German columns so
that the dead lay heaped up along the way which was leading down
to Paris, But, as one of them told me, "It made no manner of
difference. As soon as we had smashed one lot another followed,
column after column, and by sheer weight of numbers we could do
nothing to check them."

The railway was destroyed and the bridges blown up on the main line
from Amiens to Paris, and on the branch lines from Dieppe. After this
precaution the British forces fell back, fighting all the time, as far as
Compiegne. The line of the Allies was now in the shape of a V, the
Germans thrusting their main attack deep into the angle.

General d'Amade, the most popular of French generals owing to his
exploits in Morocco, had established his staff at Aumale, holding the
extreme left of the allied armies. Some of his reserves held the hills
running east and west at Beau vais, and they were in touch with Sir
John French's cavalry along the road to Amiens.

This position remained until Monday, or rather had completed itself by
that date, the retirement of the troops being maintained with masterly
skill and without any undue haste.

Meanwhile the French troops were sustaining a terrific attack on their
centre by the German left centre, which culminated at Guise, on the
River Oise, to the north-east of St. Quentin, where the river, which
runs between beautiful meadows, was choked with corpses and red
with blood.

From an eye-witness of this great battle who escaped with a slight
wound--an officer of an infantry regiment--I learned that the German
onslaught had been repelled by the work of the French gunners,
followed by a series of bayonet and cavalry charges.

"The Germans," he said, "had the elite of their army engaged against
us, including the 10th Arm