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We had thanked the young lieutenant and had bade him good-by, and were starting off again, hoping to make Maubeuge before night, when suddenly it struck me that the one thing about La Buissière I should recall most vividly was not the sight of it, all stricken and stunned and forlorn as it was, but the stench of it.
Cloud, her favourite residence, if she would engage the enemy to raise the siege of Maubeuge and withdraw; but that she refused to interfere. Arras, 1793.
There lay in the gap formed by this untoward tardiness in the British retirement, at the point M, the fortress of Maubeuge. It was garrisoned by French reserves, or Territorial troops, not of the same quality as the active army, and its defensive power was, even if the old ring of fortress theory had proved sound, of very doubtful order.
What I saw at Liege I have described in a previous chapter of this volume. What I saw at Maubeuge was even more convincing testimony, had I needed it, that the Germans had a 42- centimeter gun, and that, given certain favored conditions, they knew how to handle it effectively.
But the forts of Liége, in Belgium, had borne that selfsame reputation, and yet, when the Kaiser's forces treacherously invaded that country, and were held up at Liége, the huge guns prepared before-hand for this conflict shattered its forts masses of steel and concrete like so much paper, and later crushed the concrete defences of Maubeuge.
One was destroyed with its crew by colliding with a dummy on October 18, 1915, near Maubeuge, and the Z-28 was lost near Hamburg, and a third, whose number was unknown, at Bitterfeld, Saxony. On December 5, 1915, the Russians brought down another Zeppelin near Kalkun on the Libau-Romin railway, locating it with a powerful searchlight and destroying it by artillery fire.
Meantime Philip, who was at Brussels, had directed the Duke of Savoy to oppose the Due de Guise with an army which had been hastily collected and organized at Maubeuge, in the province of Namur. He now desired, if possible, to attack and cut off the forces of De Thermes before he should extend the hand to Guise, or make good his retreat to Calais.
Meantime Philip, who was at Brussels, had directed the Duke of Savoy to oppose the Due de Guise with an army which had been hastily collected and organized at Maubeuge, in the province of Namur. He now desired, if possible, to attack and cut off the forces of De Thermes before he should extend the hand to Guise, or make good his retreat to Calais.
On June 15 a high official in the administration of the department was at Maubeuge, on a visit to Lafayette. His name was Roederer, and we shall meet him again. He rose high under Napoleon, and is one of those to whom we owe our knowledge of the Emperor's character, as well as of the events I am about to relate. His interview with the general was interrupted by a message from Paris.
I confess that I shared these suspicions in regard to a certain factory overlooking London, and could not wholly argue myself out of them, though I hadn't an atom of evidence beyond the fact that the building had been owned by Germans and had a commanding position. I was under the hypnotism of Maubeuge and the fears to which it gave birth.
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