The gallant French commander turned again to his desk, and as the orderly, Hal and Chester passed from his tent he once more brushed the moisture from his eyes.

CHAPTER XX.

Off on A raid.

Hal and Chester accepted General Joffre’s offer of an automobile to make their return trip, which consequently did not consume as much time as their journey to the headquarters of the French commander-in-chief.

The first thing they did upon their arrival was to report to General French.  The latter listened gravely to their story, and then said: 

“I know that I need not caution you to obey General Joffre’s injunction concerning the fate of General Tromp.  Let the matter be forgotten.”

The lads saluted and left the tent to hunt up temporary quarters of their own, for the great army had again come to a halt.

Meanwhile, what of the great driving movement of the allied forces, which after checking the vast German horde almost at the gates of Paris, had forced the foe back mile after mile without cessation?  A word of the situation is here necessary.

From the first moment when the allied armies had assumed the offensive, after being driven back for days by the Germans, they had continued their steady advance.  Such fighting as the world had never known was in progress continually, for the Germans contested every inch of the ground.

Time after time the Allies threatened the German lines of communication, and the Germans were forced to fall back to protect them, or to be cut off and eventually annihilated, or forced to surrender.  The strategy of General Joffre, condemned by many in the earlier days of the war, now was beginning to bear fruit, and he was praised on every hand.

The English, under the command of Sir John French, the chief stumbling block in the path of the Germans as they advanced on Paris, were proving their mettle every day.  Despite their numerical inferiority to the enemy, they stood bravely to their herculean task, until now the whole world realized that they were the real fighting strength of the allied armies.

Each day found the Germans farther and farther from the towns of Paris.  Each day found the Allies pressing the foe more closely.  The great battle line, stretching out for more than 200 miles, was in constant contact with the enemy.  Almost hourly their was such severe fighting as in former wars would have earned the designation of battles.  But along this great line they were but skirmishes.

The losses on both sides had been tremendous, although the Germans, because of the fact that they had been previously on the offensive, and also because of the massed formation they had used in their advance, had suffered considerably more than the Allies.

Louvain and other towns in Belgium had been sacked by the Germans, pillaged with fire and sword, until hardly one stone was left upon another.  And now the fighting was again in Belgium, that little buffer state which, ever since she became a nation, has always been the battleground of European wars.