“Early in September we heard that the Allies had rallied, however. The English had imported Sepoys from India, and the French, black men from Algeria to help them in fighting, and had thrown themselves between trembling Paris and the advancing Teuton. Then, on the 7th, I think it was, came news that the German right wing had been checked almost within cannon shot of the French capital, and that the whole auxiliary army of the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm had been hurled back by a masterly flank movement on the part of the French under General Joffre.
“That seemed to be the turning point. Reinforcements were daily arriving for the Allied army from England and elsewhere; it was difficult for the hard-pressed Germans to get sufficient supplies so far from their own boundaries, and, moreover, the Russian hordes had in the meantime overrun all of East Prussia and had become a dire menace there. A party of the Army of the West was rushed across Germany to help General Von Hindenburg resist the Russian assault, and Von Kluck reluctantly fell back from Paris to the French frontier, fighting desperately every inch of the way.
“There the most sanguinary battles of the war were fought as the Allies pressed on after the retreating Germans. All of you boys have read in the newspapers of the battles of the Meuse, of the Marne, at Mons, and along that tremendous battle line of the Aisne.
“Those terrible conflicts will go down in history as the most awful of their kind ever known on earth. The dead filled the trenches and river bed so deep that they formed a solid footing for their comrades to fight hand to hand with Englishman, Frenchman, Hindu, Belgian, Algerian and Lorrainer.
“Winter came with cold, ice, sleet and snow, to intensify the sufferings of the inadequately protected soldiers. Thousands of wounded died from exposure on the field where they fell. They fought on the earth, in tunnels under it, high up in the air, on the sea and under the sea. They mined the whole North Sea and the English Channel. Antwerp surrendered and Ghent fell before the Germans.
“And all of that time I was cooped up in one Belgian town or another, stopped every time I tried to get anywhere near the battle front, with the Herald cabling me every day or so for some real news—the stuff that they didn’t get through Associated Press channels—‘copy’ that would enable them to print something that everybody else didn’t have.
“So finally I grew desperate and determined to get closer to the scene of actual fighting, at no matter what hazard. Right then my real troubles began.”
CHAPTER XVIII
HOW BOB WAS CAPTURED AS A SPY
“Now,” said Buck with a grin, “we are about to get down to something that hasn’t been printed forty times in the newspapers.”