All accommodation in the town had by one blanket order been requisitioned for the military. We plowed our way through rain and mud to the office of the Mayor who kindly assigned us to rooms, giving us written orders on the owners, who turned out to be a quaint old French shirtmaker and his wife. Hall and I went scouting around through the place and managed to get hold of a fourteen-sou loaf of bread and two bottles of wine which served as supper, thus saving our own precious supplies for future emergencies. Before returning, we visited two cafés which were jammed with soldiery, from whom we managed to glean a lot of very interesting information. They all spoke with the greatest respect, admiration, and affection of their field artillery, “le soixante-quinze.”
Provisions were very scarce. We saw a Turco, who had apparently lost his regiment and who spoke scarcely any French, vainly trying to find some food. He walked about through the cafés waving a one hundred franc note in each hand and ceaselessly demanding something to eat.
After supper a council of war was held in order to decide upon our course of action for the morrow. Captain Parker was eager to hunt for a vortex of the battle where, he held, the primary decision must have been lost and won and the fighting would have been most intense; while the action on all the other parts of the line must have been contingent upon the results at this “tactical center.” This “focus” could not have been to the north or west of Paris, because the great bodies of French troops are to the east; nor was it on the battle line nearest Paris, for everything we saw today in and behind the zone of operations testified to the contrary. In all the actions we have so far observed, the Germans were retiring deliberately in a retreat evidently determined by some ulterior cause. We noted many places where severe fighting had taken place, but in every case it bore the unmistakable signs of being merely a hotly contested rearguard action. We so far have neither seen nor heard of any great German defeat such as must somewhere have occurred in order to start a general retreat, and to force such numerous rearguard actions. A victorious German army does not suddenly begin to retire unless compelled to do so by a gigantic and crushing defeat at some one point; such a defeat must mean days of losses so frightful that the beaten army is physically exhausted and its morale shaken.
From a military point of view it was of vital importance to discover this spot and to study the battlefield for lessons in tactics. Captain Parker maintained that it would be more profitable to find this center than to give way to our inclination to go forward into the actual fighting; that if we could locate it, it would be best to stay upon the abandoned field of the German defeat to study how the battle had been fought. He pointed out that the opportunity would be equivalent to being upon the field of Waterloo or Gettysburg the day after action ceased. As a result of the conference, it was finally decided to accept Captain Parker’s contention and hunt for the battlefield of the great and decisive French victory, rather than to turn north toward the constant booming of cannon. We shall, therefore, continue to work our way to the eastward toward Chalons-sur-Marne, beating back and forth across the country and carefully covering all the ground.
At the Front, Saturday, September 12th. We slept last night in beds which had recently been occupied by German officers and spent a very chilly night therein on account of the cold, wet wind which blew in through the many shattered windows. We woke to the rumbling of distant cannon, which might more correctly be called a trembling of the air rather than a true sound. Still hoarding our provisions, we ate a frugal breakfast of stale bread and of tea made from the dried leaves of linden trees. We started off at half-past seven, receiving a very friendly God-speed from our aged host and hostess.
All morning we made our way in an easterly direction, beating back and forth across the country in order to cover as much ground as possible. When we turned to the north the sound of cannon became louder and when we swung to the south it grew fainter. We studied the country carefully and, when possible, talked with any of the Allied officers we chanced to meet. They usually knew thoroughly the events which had taken place in the particular neighborhood in which they had operated, but were astonishingly ignorant of what had gone on at any distance. What they told us was always very valuable, because it assisted us to piece together the fabric of the campaign as a whole.