htfully disappointing," wrote a German officer whose
letter was found afterwards on his dead body. "We believed that we
should enter Paris in triumph and to turn away from it is a bitter thing
for the men. But I trust our chiefs and I know that it is only a
strategical retirement. Paris will still be ours."

Truly it was a strategical retirement and not a "rout," as it was called
by the English Press Bureau. But all retirements are costly when the
enemy follows close, and the rearguard of Von Kluck's army was in a
terrible plight and suffered heavy losses. The French light artillery
opened fire in a running pursuit, advancing their guns from position to
position with very brief halts, during which the famous soixante-quinze
flung out shells upon bodies of troops at close range--so that they fell
like wheat cut to pieces in a hailstorm. The British gunners were
pushing forward, less impetuously but with a steady persistence, to
the west of the River Ourcq, and after all their hardships; losses, and
fatigues, the men who had been tired of retreating were heartened
now that their turn had come to give chase.

Episodes that seem as incredible as a boy's romance of war took
place in those first days of September when the German right rolled
back in a retreating tide. On one of those days an English regiment
marched along a dusty road for miles with another body of men
tramping at the same pace on a parallel road, in the same white dust
which cloaked their uniforms--not of English khaki, but made in
Germany. Hundreds of German soldiers, exhausted by this forced
march in the heat, without food or water, fell out, took to the cover of
woods, and remained there for weeks, in parties of six or eight,
making their way to lonely farmhouses where they demanded food
with rifles levelled at frightened peasants, taking pot-shots at English
soldiers who had fallen out in the same way, and hiding in thickets
until they were hunted out by battues of soldiers long after the first
great battle of the Marne. It was the time for strange adventures when
even civilians wandering in the wake of battle found themselves
covered by the weapons of men who cared nothing for human life,
whether it was their own or another's, and when small battalions of
French or English, led by daring officers, fought separate battles in
isolated villages, held by small bodies of the enemy, cut off from the
main army but savagely determined to fight to the death.