Morning, noon and night, dusk, midnight and dawn, Von Kluck drove the attack, leaving scant time for food, less time for rest and practically no time for sleep, seeking to wear down human resistance by sheer exhaustion and fatigue. But he could not break the line.
Horace found the same terrific pressure on the Fourth Army, forced back by Von Hausen and the Duke of Würtemberg. He had feared to find a rout, remembering the breaking condition in which he had left the army, but he found it reformed, reënforced, strong as ever and filled with a grim determination to save Paris at all costs. The men of his old battery greeted him with a shout.
"Where have you been?" they cried. "Tell us the news."
Horace told all that he knew, or rather, all that he thought he ought to tell, describing the desperate though resistant condition of the British expeditionary force.
"But they're retreating, too," said a gun-layer, gloomily, "always retreating. Are we going to give those dogs of Boches all of France?"
So it seemed as day after day passed by.
Back, back, and ever back.
Retreat amid the wounded, retreat in hopeless rear-guard actions with dead on every side, retreat on roads crowded with homeless and hopeless refugees fleeing anywhere away from the advancing horror of war, retreat without food, retreat without sleep, retreat in rain, in mud, in blazing heat, in choking thirst, retreat under the reproachful eyes of deserted women, retreat under the stinging shame of defeat, retreat until the heart was as weary as the feet and death would be a boon.
Retreat over a front of 200 miles, with every road, every street, every lane, every by-path surging with misery, crowded with panic.
France, their France, trodden under the heel of the invader!