A beaten enemy

A flank attack

Von Kluck’s difficult position

We now have the third chapter of Sir John French’s history of the war to date and few will be able to read it unmoved. It is unnecessary to refrain from remarking that it bears out to the full the hopeful anticipations to which expression has here been given.

“I feel sure,” says General French, “that we only have to hold on with tenacity to the ground that we have won for a very short time longer, when the allies will again be in pursuit of a beaten enemy. The self sacrificing devotion and splendid spirit of the British army in France will carry all before it.

“As has been remarked the German soldier came to this war the better equiped, the most perfectly drilled machine in the world. He came armed with the assurance that he was the greatest fighting man who ever donned that uniform. He has lived long enough to know that man for man the British, Belgian and French are his superior. The war has progressed enough for him to know that the British army is capable of carrying all before it.

“The military experts, it is to be noted, tell us that the end of the great battle does not seem to have come appreciably nearer, those critics seem continuously incapable of allowing for anything that is not on the immediate surface.

“The enemy may have been fully aware of the approach of that large army from the west and the north west, there is evidence of that knowledge, and it is just possible that the allies would have been in a better position to bring off a coup, if our telegraph offices had been instructed to despatch no message to Rotterdam business houses.

“I am sending ten tons of potatoes may easily be de-coded to ten thousand troops, and there can be little doubt that detailed information has, in this way, got through via Holland and Turkey. At the same time a knowledge of what the enemy has to encounter does not necessarily place him in a situation to be able to deal with that, and so it will prove in this case.

“There is a great deal of secrecy as to Von Kluck’s movements and the story of th removal of his headquarter to Mons may be true but it is hardly likely. It is difficult o see how he can possibly benefit from it or how it could fit in with the general scheme.

“That there is a movement of the enemy in the direction of meeting the flank attack is clear from numerous indications. How far it will be carried remains to be seen. Fighting on a considerable scale is taking place about St Quentin, it is clear too that the movement of the entire German army will be governed almost entirely by what happens to the right. Von Kluck has had large reinforcements but his hour has nearly come. Time fights on the side of the allies and its forces are growing daily.”