Paris will still be ours."
Truly it was a strategical retirement and not a "rout," as it was called
by the English Press Bureau. But all retirements are costly when the
enemy follows close, and the rearguard of Von Kluck's army was in a
terrible plight and suffered heavy losses. The French light artillery
opened fire in a running pursuit, advancing their guns from position to
position with very brief halts, during which the famous soixante-quinze
flung out shells upon bodies of troops at close range--so that they fell
like wheat cut to pieces in a hailstorm. The British gunners were
pushing forward, less impetuously but with a steady persistence, to
the west of the River Ourcq, and after all their hardships; losses, and
fatigues, the men who had been tired of retreating were heartened
now that their turn had come to give chase.
Episodes that seem as incredible as a boy's romance of war took
place in those first days of September when the German right rolled
back in a retreating tide. On one of those days an English regiment
marched along a dusty road for miles with another body of men
tramping at the same pace on a parallel road, in the same white dust
which cloaked their uniforms--not of English khaki, but made in
Germany.
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