The German soldiers facing Joffre were acting on general orders printed for them eight years before, and under specific orders which had been worked out by their high command with the particularity of machine specifications.  And all their presumptions were based on the French doing what Teutons would do in the same circumstances.  Their extra-suspender-button efficiency and preparedness were pitted against the flexible genius of a man who could assemble his two “shock” armies in two days and put them under the command of men picked not from the top of his list of available commanders, but practically from the bottom.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of Joffre were those which had sustained the terrific onslaught in the north and had been fighting in retreat, practically since the beginning.

On August 25 Joffre declared; “We have escaped envelopment”—­thanks largely to the action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians—­and, clearly seeing that he could not hope for favorable results from a great battle fought in the north, he gave the order for retreat which meant the abandonment of north-eastern France to the Hunnish hordes.

What anguish that order caused him we shall never know.  He realized to the full what the people of that great, prosperous part of France would have to suffer.  He was aware what the loss of those resources would mean to the French, and also what their gain would mean to the Germans.  He understood the effect of retreat upon the morale of his men.  And he must have been aware of the panic his order would create throughout the yet-uninvaded parts of France where no one could know at what point the invasion would be checked.  He knew that the nation’s faith in him would be severely shaken, and that even his army’s faith in him would be put to a supreme test.

But when a man trains himself to be a commander of men, he trains himself to go through, heroically and at any cost, what he believes must be done.  To sacrifice one’s self comes comparatively easy—­given compelling circumstances and an obedient soul.  But to sacrifice others never becomes easy to a man who respects the rights of others.  And we shall never begin to comprehend men like Joffre and Foch until we shake ourselves free from any notion we may have that military expediency makes it easy for them to order great mental and physical suffering.

General Foch detached himself, on August 29, from his beloved Twentieth corps and betook himself to the little village of Machault, about twenty miles northeast of Chalons-sur-Marne, where he found assembled for his command an army made up of units from other armies.  They were all more or less strange to one another and to him.

There was the Ninth army corps, from Tours, made up of Angevins (men such as Foch had learned to know when he was at Saumur) and Vendeans (the Bretons’ south neighbors).  Some of these men had been fighting without respite for nine days as they fell back, with the Fourth army, from the Belgian border.  With them, since August 22, had been the remarkable Moroccan division under General Humbert.