Chapter V The Turn Of The Tide

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The Germans were baulked of Paris.  Even now, looking back on those days, I sometimes wonder why they made that sudden swerve to the south-east, missing their great objective.  It was for Paris that they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits.  The prize of Paris—­ Paris the great and beautiful—­seemed to be within their grasp, and the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a dread proof of German power.

As I have said, all the north-west corner of France was denuded of troops, with the exception of some poor Territorials, ill-trained and ill-equipped, and never meant to withstand the crush of Imperial troops advancing in hordes with masses of artillery, so that they fled like panic-stricken sheep.  The forts of Paris on the western side would not have held out for half a day against the German guns.  All that feverish activity of trench work was but a pitiable exhibition of an unprepared defence.  The enemy would have swept over them like a rolling tide.  The little British army was still holding together, but it had lost heavily and was winded after its rapid retreat.  The army of Paris was waiting to fight and would have fought to the death, but without support from other army corps still a day’s journey distant, its peril would have been great, and if the enemy’s right wing had been hurled with full force against it at the critical moment it might have been crushed and annihilated.  Von Kluck had twenty-four hours in his favour.  If he had been swift to use them before Joffre could have hurried up his regiments to the rescue, German boots might have tramped down through the Place de la Republique to the Place de la Concorde, and German horses might have been stabled in the Palais des Beaux-Arts.  I am sure of that, because I saw the beginning of demoralization, the first signs of an enormous tragedy, creeping closer to an expectant city.

In spite of the optimism of French officers and men, an optimism as strong as religious faith, I believe now, searching back to facts, that it was not justified by the military situation.  It was justified only by the miracle that followed faith.  Von Kluck does not seem to have known that the French army was in desperate need of those twenty-four hours which he gave them by his hesitation.  If he had come straight on for Paris with the same rapidity as his men had marched in earlier stages and with the same resolve to smash through regardless of cost, the city would have been his and France would have reeled under the blow.  The psychological effect of the capital being in the enemy’s hands would have been worth