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Isabella cast an "I-told-you-so" look at her sister and glanced expectantly at the maid. "What is it, Delia?" "I'm thinkin', Miss Marne, you'd better be lookin' for a new girl." "Why, what's the matter? You don't want to leave us, do you?" "No, miss, I don't want to, an' that's the truth. But I don't think I'll be stayin' any longer than you can get another girl." "What's the trouble, Delia?"
One of the Emperor's aides de camp arrived at Marmont's. Napoleon, being informed of the advance of the Allies on Paris, had marched with the utmost speed from the banks of the Marne on the road of Fontainebleau. In the evening he was in person at Froidmanteau, whence he despatched his envoy to Marshal Marmont.
What one may call the war-consciousness of France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on the one hand her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports, the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of 1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning of that series of great actions on the British front which finished the war all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in efficiency and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as it emerged from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense of boundless resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the irrevocable part America was now called on to play in European affairs: amid these three great and sometimes clashing currents, the visitor to France lived and moved in the early weeks of the year.
Besides, we were moving pretty fast but in order to get across the Marne, toward which we have been drawing the Germans, and in every one of these battles we have been fighting with one man to their ten." I asked him where the Germans were. "Can't say," he replied. "And the French?" "No idea. We've not seen them yet.
The battles that have been named the Battle of Mortagne, the Battle of the Meurthe, the Battle of the Vosges, all waged by the First Army, were extremely violent in the last week of August and the first two weeks of September. These combats partly coincided with the Battle of the Marne; they resulted, at the end of that battle, in the German retreat.
After General von Kluck was wounded and returned to his villa in Wilmersdorf, a suburb of Berlin, I took a walk with him in his garden and discussed the Marne. He confirmed what Zimmermann stated about the shortage of ammunition and added that he had to give up his reserves to General von Hindenburg, who had been ordered by the Kaiser to drive the Russians from East Prussia.
Perhaps it was its unexpectedness, for I was sure that the guns had not been heard in this area since before the Marne. The noise must be travelling down the Oise valley, and I judged there was big fighting somewhere about Chauny or La Fere. That meant that the enemy was pressing hard on a huge front, for here was clearly a great effort on his extreme left wing. Unless it was our counter-attack.
The greenish gray monster still had its armed head stretched across the other side of the Marne, but its tail was beginning to uncoil with uneasy wrigglings. After night had settled down the troops were still continuing to fall back. The cannonading was certainly coming nearer. Some of the thunderous claps sounded so close that they made the glass tremble in the windows.
It saved France from despair, possibly from the annihilation that follows despair. And ever since the Marne victory, French confidence and elan have been rapidly growing. During that bloody September week they realized that the barbarian was not invincible, the machine was not so perfect but that human will and human courage could resist it.
In March of 1915 I went out with the first body of accredited war correspondents, and we saw some of the bad places where our men lived and died, and the traffic to the lines, and the mechanism of war in fixed positions as were then established after the battle of the Marne and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an experimental visit.
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