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Updated: June 9, 2025
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, In looking back over my two preceding letters, I realise how inadequately they express the hundredth part of that vast and insoluble debt of a guilty Germany to an injured France, the realisation of which became for me in Lorraine, on the Ourcq, and in Artois, a burning and overmastering thing, from which I was rarely or never free.
As, however, the divisions from Alsace were much in evidence three or four days later, it is more than probable that these divisions were intended for service at this point, and also to reenforce General von Kluck's army, but that, by the quick offensive assumed by General Joffre on the Ourcq, and, owing to the roundabout nature of the German means of communication, these expected reenforcements had not arrived.
"We'll fill the gaps with the police," said the general, inspired perhaps by Sainte-Geneviève. So the deed was dared; and in a panic at sight of the mysteriously arriving troops, Von Kluck retreated from the Ourcq to the Aisne. It was when he heard how the trick had been played and won by sheer bravado, that he cried out in rage, "How could I count on such a coup?
Hence it followed that the brilliant work of the Sixth French Army on this first day of the battles of the Marne achieved no important result, for the long-range hidden howitzers, manned by expert German gunners and well supplied with ammunition, defied all attempts at crossing the little stream of the Ourcq.
Nor could General Joffre send any reenforcements. Every available source of reenforcements had been drawn upon to aid the Sixth Army, encamped upon the banks of the Ourcq, in order that Paris might be well guarded. No troops could be spared from the Fifth and Ninth Armies, which had to bear the brunt of the attack from the German center.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, Shall I ever forget that broad wintry plateau of the Ourcq, as it lay, at the opening of March, under its bed of snow, with its ruined villages, its graves scattered over the fields, its utter loneliness, save for the columns of marching soldiers in the roads, and the howling wind that rushed over the fields, the graves, the cemeteries, and whistled through the gaping walls of the poor churches and farms?
The troops were eager to get to work with the bayonet, and greatly aided by their field artillery, in which mobility had been sacrificed to power, they quickly cleared the hills to the westward of the Ourcq. By nightfall of September 5, 1914, the country west of the Ourcq was in French hands. But to cross that river seemed impossible.
On Saturday, September 5, 1914, at the extreme north of the line of the two armies facing each other across the Ourcq, an artillery duel began. The offensive was taken by the French, and though in itself it was not more striking than any of the artillery clashes that had marked the previous month's fighting, it was significant, for it marked the beginning of the battles of the Marne.
No. 8 Battle of the Ourcq Von Kluck's Mistake Anniversary of the Battle Wreckage of War A Burying Party A Funeral A Five Days' Battle Life-and-Death Fighting "Salut au Drapeau" Meaux Vareddes Murders at Vareddes Von Kluck's Approach The Turn of the Tide The Old Curé German Brutalities Torturers The Curé's Sufferings "He is a Spy" A Weary March Outrages Victims Reparation To Lorraine. No. 9
The body has not yet been found; it is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point: this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean Valjean." Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne.
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