d
out that none of the defeats had materially affected the fighting
value of his armies. Thus the army defeated at Morhange was promptly
reenforced by the troops drawn out of Muelhausen and in turn defeated
and repulsed its conquerors before Nancy, in one of the bloodiest
battles of the war. The army defeated at Neufchateau made good its
position behind the Meuse from Verdun to Charleville and inflicted
grave losses upon the Germans endeavoring to pass the river. Even the
army defeated at Charleroi was able, a few days later at Guise, to
pass to the offensive and throw back the Prussian Guard into the Oise.
(Vol. II, 90-92.)

Meantime two new armies, one under Foch, the other under Manoury, were
in the making and there was reason to believe that it would be
possible to renew the battle on the line of the Aisne, the Oise, and
the Somme. But there was one grave peril. German plans had not only
taken the French by surprise in making the main thrust through
Belgium, but had prepared to send this way a far greater number of men
than France had expected and had sent them much farther to the west.
The result was that the weight of the blow had fallen upon the
British. The British army had been compelled to make a night and day
retreat and had narrowly escaped destruction at Cambrai on August 26,
1914, "the most critical day." (Vol. II, 77.) The British army was too
heavily outnumbered to meet the German attack, its retreat had been so
rapid that the line of the Somme was about to be lost before the
British could be supported by Manoury's army, which came up on its
western flank too late. There was, therefore, the real danger that
Kluck might get between Paris and the main mass of the Allied armies,
enveloping them and producing a Sedan ten times greater than that
which had wrecked the Third Empire.

Joffre, accordingly, decided to continue the retreat and brought all
his forces that were west of the Meuse, in good order and no longer
heavily pressed back behind the Marne and on a line from Paris,
through Meaux, Sezanne, La Fere Champenoise, Vitry-le-Francois,
Bar-le-Duc, and thence north to Verdun. He thus stood with his forces
in a semicircle, the concave side toward the Germans and his flanks
resting upon Paris and Verdun, whose forts covered these flanks. (Vol.
II, 83.)

By September I, 1914, it was plain to the Germans that the French army
had escaped its embrace and that no envelopment was longer possible.
It remaine