Right into this confused mass came running some R..A.M.C. orderlies. "The Germans are just behind!" they shouted. There might have been a bad panic with all those civilians about, but there was only rather more confusion. The Staff officer gave a general order to retire on St. Quentin (a large town about seven miles to the south); and then there was one mad rush.
Motor-lorries blocked the whole road, trying to reverse, while wounded and stragglers made a dash for the nearest vehicles. Ammunition columns struck off the road on to the open down-land. The refugees streamed straight across country. Down the road the heavy lorries went pounding, and soon outdistanced everyone else. At one corner there were two R.F.A. drivers in charge of five heavy draught horses. "Germans be'ind us," yelled a lorry driver; "better move!" And they did move. The sight of those old "hairies" clopping down the road at a hand gallop after the disappearing lorries was too ludicrous for words.
By 3 P.M. the weight of the enemy's attack had begun to tell, and, to quote the Commander-in-Chief's dispatch, "it became apparent that, if complete annihilation was to be avoided, a retirement must be attempted; and the order was given to commence it about 3.30 P.M."
Now came the most critical time of all. At the beginning of the day the enemy must have imagined that a retirement would be made at the earliest opportunity. But as the hours passed, and the British line still held, the impression may have spread that they intended to fight the day to a finish where they stood. Certainly it is impossible to think that had they realised a definite retirement to be in progress, they would not have thrown every man they had upon the rear of the Corps.
Slowly and cautiously, then, regiment after regiment fell back. I have tried to show in an earlier chapter what that means and how much depends upon the guns at such a juncture. Again I can only quote the Commander-in-Chief's words: "The movement was covered with the most devoted intrepidity and determination by the artillery, which had itself suffered severely."
I will just give one instance of what that devotion meant, a devotion which, as has everywhere been agreed, saved the situation.
Close under a ridge a battery had been in action without a moment's rest for the last six hours. One gun after another had been knocked out, the battery commander and every officer save one killed, all the men of the detachments killed or wounded, until there was left just one gun, one subaltern, and one driver. And still they kept the battery in action; still they loaded and fired, as they had been doing all through that ghastly day.
"Got a drink?" said the subaltern; "a cigarette? Good! Thank God for a white man's cigarette again!" And he went on with his job. That was what "covering the movement" meant.
But the battle had been won. General Smith-Dorrien, his officers and men, had accomplished the almost superhuman task thrust upon them. They had not merely held the German attack through all the long hours of that blazing August day; they had broken it. For the remainder of the Retreat it never recovered its sting and energy, and so the Force and Paris were saved.
Events have had time to shape themselves during the months that have lapsed since August, 1914, and it is possible to view them in a certain perspective. It has been urged that we British have exaggerated the importance of the work of the Force in the Retreat; that while we were holding a line of no more than 20 odd miles, the French were extended over a front of 400 miles against an equally strong attack; that, by the prominence given to the work of the Force to the neglect of that of the French, a distorted picture has been given of the operations during August from Alsace to the sea.