From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to bear.

The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the single object of victory in foreign war.

It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of the Renaissance.  By geographical accident, coupled with the conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise, the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of a campaign.  They have almost invariably begun their great wars with defeats and retirements.  They have only succeeded when a patient, tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan.  It was so against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914.  There is in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and salutary exception to the rule—­their failure against Caesar; from which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition—­still vigorous.

* * * * *

The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not defended.  Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel, the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Chalons, while the British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris.  And on Sedan day, 2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its end.

The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to the German commanders a further French defeat.  Those commanders knew their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the Allied forces—­a superiority of some 60 per cent.  They may have guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.

Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great effort in the West was already achieved.