ll-fire
had increased. I was sent up again to examine the right about Le Cateau,
and on reporting at 2.45 p.m. the General told me that the Fifth
Division had been unable to withstand a most determined artillery
attack, and had come back. He added that he had no doubt he would
succeed in getting them back somehow, and requested me to inform Sir
Archibald Murray. I left at 3.0 p.m. and reported to General
Headquarters as ordered.'

General Smith-Dorrien did succeed in getting them back. The stand made
at Le Cateau was a great fight against odds; and the part played in the
battle by the Royal Flying Corps seems a little thing when it is
compared with the gallant resistance of the infantry. But British
machines were flying over the enemy, under fire, within full view of the
British army, and some British officers who took part in the battle have
described how the sight of our aeroplanes above them raised the spirits
of the troops and gave them a feeling of security.

Copies of the original reports made out by observers before and during
the retreat from Mons are preserved in the war diary of headquarters,
Royal Flying Corps. It is not possible to say when each of these reports
reached General Headquarters; they were sent in as soon as possible
after the machines landed--some of them at once by telephone. When the
reports are systematically mapped out, day by day, they give a fairly
accurate picture of the German advance and throw light on the German
plans. General von Kluck speaks more than once of driving the British
army before him, but the complete map of the German movements, as they
were reported day by day from the air, shows that his predominant idea
was to envelop them. Always the crab-like claw is seen extended to the
west and beginning to close in on the line of the British retreat;
always the British army is already at a point farther south on the line,
out of the reach of the claw. When with swollen and blistered feet and
half asleep on the march, the patient British soldier carried on, he was
doing more to defeat the Germans than he could have done if his dearest
wish had been granted and he had been allowed to make a desperate stand.
It is a wonderful army that can suffer the long depression and fatigue
of such a retreat and yet keep its fighting quality unimpaired.

Von Kluck's advance after the battle of Le Cateau was directed to the
south-west. Speaking of the situation on the 28th. of August, he says,