Such then was the situation at 5.0 P.M. on that eventful Sunday. An average of nearly four times our number of guns against us all along the position. No wonder that senior officers had guessed from the first that "something was wrong."
And G.H.Q.? You imagine, perhaps, that the municipal offices where the General Staff had its abode would now be seething with excitement. You will picture Staff officers rushing from room to room; orders and counter-orders being reeled off; the Intelligence and Army Signals Departments looking like Peter Robinson's in sales week; an army of motor-cyclist dispatch riders being hurled from the courtyard towards every point of the compass.
Wrong! G.H.Q. that day, and the next, was less concerned than a little French provincial mairie would be on France's national fête day. The casual visitor would have seen less bustle of activity than at the Liverpool offices of a shipping firm on mail day.
The Postal Department: "Business as usual." Army Censor: Not much doing. Intelligence: Half a dozen red-tabbed officers looking at big maps with blue and red chalk-marks on them. Director of Ordnance Supplies: "Better see about moving rail-head a few miles farther south." A.G.'s (Adjutant-General) Office: "We shall want orders out about stragglers, what they are to do." And so on, all through the list. If this was an instance of that British phlegm which so amuses the French, then commend me to it! If anybody wanted a tonic against pessimism these days of the Retreat he only had to drop in at G.H.Q. He would certainly come out with the conviction that we should indeed be home by Christmas, with the German Army wiped off the map.
Yes, that week which followed, indeed, welded into one "band of brothers" all the officers and men in the little Force. In those days everybody seemed to know everybody else. Regimental jealousy (if it ever existed) was obliterated completely, and every officer and man, from the General Officers Commanding Corps down to the bus drivers who drove the A.S.C. lorries, worked shoulder to shoulder. And so we pulled through.
Now there were other units in the Force besides those in the firing-line. There were all those columns which trekked up by road. Normally, most of these should be something like 15 miles to the rear. They know very little of what is going on ahead of them, though the ammunition columns can gauge fairly well by the demands made on them.
So it was that about midnight on that Sunday they began to realise back there that things were moving by a sudden and insistent demand for every scrap of rifle and 18-pr. ammunition they carried.
No sooner was that sent than there came more demands, and there was nothing to send. Wagons and lorries had trundled off at once to rail-head, but it would be hours before they could get back. Thus, on the very first day, the overwhelming nature of the situation pulled at and snapped the slender threads of communication. The threads were soon mended, but, as will be seen later, they never got properly into working order until the Marne.
Nor did those columns altogether escape disaster even at the very outset of the fighting. One, out towards the flank, was attacked and practically destroyed by raiding cavalry, for they do not work with escorts.
In one column, about 10.0 P.M., the alarm was given by an imaginative A.S.C. subaltern. What the men were to fight with is not clear, for only about 25 per cent. of the detachment had ever handled a rifle, and no ammunition was issued.