The great strategical plan of the Germans, which had displayed itself throughout the entire operations on the western theatre of war from the very first gun of the campaign, came to its apex on this September 3, 1914.  If the allied armies could develop a strong enough defense to halt the German offensive at this point, and especially if they could develop a sufficiently powerful counteroffensive to strike doubt into the confident expectations of the armies of the Central Powers, then the strategical plan had reached a check, which might or might not be a checkmate, as the fortunes of war might determine.  If, on the other hand, the stand made by the Allies at this point should prove ineffective, and if the counteroffensive should reveal that the German hosts had been able to establish impregnable defenses as they marched, then the original strategic plan of the attackers must be considered as intact and the peril of France would become greatly intensified.

It is idle, in a war of such astounding magnitude, to speak about any one single incident as being a “decisive” one.  Such a term can only rightly be applied to conditions where the opposing powers each have but one organized army in the field, and these armies meet in a pitched battle.  None the less, the several actions which are known as the Battles of the Marne may be considered as decisive, to the extent that they decided the limit of the German offensive at that point.  The German General Staff, taking the ordinary and obvious precautions in the case of a possible repulse, chose and fortified in the German rear positions to which its forces might fall back in the event of retreat.  These prepared positions had a secondary contingent value for the Germans in view of the grave Russian menace that might call at any moment for a transfer of German troops from the western to the eastern front.

The Battle of the Marne stopped the advance of the main German army on that line, forcing it back.

[Illustration:  Battle of the Marne—­beginning on September 5, 1914]

The scene of the battle ground is one of the most famous in Europe, not even the plains of Belgium possessing a richer historical significance than that melancholy plain, the Champagne-Pouilleuse, upon whose inhospitable flats rested for centuries the curse of a prophecy, that there would the fate of France be decided, a prophecy of rare connotation of accuracy, for it refrained from stating what that fate should be.  Yet the historic sense is amplified even more by remembrance than by prophecy, for in the territory confronting that huge arc on which 1,400,000 German and Austrian soldiers lay encamped, awaiting what even the German generals declared to be “the great decision,” there lies, on the old Roman road running from Chalons a vast oval mound, known to tradition as “the Camp of Attila.”  In that country, a Roman general, Aetius, leading a host of soldiers of whom many were Gauls, broke a vast flood wave of the Huns as those savage Mongol hordes hurled themselves against Rome’s westernmost possession.  On that occasion, however, the Visigoths, under their King Theodoric, fought side by side with the Gauls.  Then, the dwellers on the banks of the Rhine and on the banks of the Seine were brothers in arms, now, that same countryside shall see them locked in deadly conflict.