ADVANCE!
There was a cheer which must have startled the French Government in Bordeaux, or whereever they had gone to.
The drivers rushed at their horses, the gunners rushed to the limbers to help hook in. "Stand to your horses!" sang out the sergeant-major. Then, in a very few minutes: "Battery all ready, sir!"
The major stood up in his stirrups with a splendid laugh in his eyes.
"Sub-sections right-about-wheel! Walk, march!"
Another rousing shout, which soon merged into the cheery strains of "All aboard for Dixie," and the battery began a march, this time in the right direction, which only stopped at 2 A.M. for the sake of the horses. The men were ready to go on for a week.
The great Retreat had ended. The Advance had begun.
How and why the tide turned against the invaders at that, for them, most critical moment we cannot exactly tell. It was, as I see it, a combination of circumstances. There was the imminence of the Russian invasion into Prussia, and it was said that the Germans withdrew two army corps from the Western front to meet it. There was the sudden production by the French Commander-in-Chief of an entirely new French army from behind Paris to attack the German right.
But one thing, at least, is certain. Von Kluck made, perhaps, the biggest mistake in his life in imagining that "the contemptible little army" which he and his legions had been hunting for a fortnight was now too dispirited and broken for further fighting; and, with that conviction in his mind, he started to do the very thing which the most elementary military textbooks tell you is absolutely wrong. He moved his army across the unbroken front of a hostile force.
General Smith-Dorrien had been compelled to do the same thing with the Second Corps only three days before. But he did it with the full knowledge of the dangers, and he took every possible precaution to obviate them. He succeeded.