offre the now historic message:

"The moment has come for the army to advance at all costs and allow
itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."

The men to whom this order was relayed by their commanders had,
five-sixths of them, been ceaselessly engaged, without one single day's
rest of any kind and much of the time without night rest either, for
fourteen days, fighting as they fell back, and falling back as they
fought; the skin was all worn from the soles of their feet, and what
shoes they had left were stuck to their feet with blood.

"They had marched under a torrid sky," says Louis Madelin, "on
scorching roads, parched and suffocated with dust. In reality they
moved with their hearts rather than with their legs. According to
Pierre Lasserre's happy expression, 'Our bodies had beaten a retreat,
but not our hearts,' . . . But when, worn out with fatigue, faces
black with powder, blinded by the chalk of Champagne, almost dying,
they learned Joffre's order announcing the offensive, then the faces of
our troops from Paris to Verdun beamed with joy. They fought with
tired limbs, and yet no army ever showed such strength, for their
hearts were filled with faith and hope."

At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch pitched his headquarters in a
modern chateau near the little village of Pleurs, which you probably
will not find on any map except a military one, but it is some six
miles southeast of Sezanne. And the front assigned to Foch ran from
Sezanne to the Camp de Mailly, twenty-five miles east by a little
south. The Marne was twenty-five miles to north of him. Between him
and its south bank were many towns and villages; the clay pocket (ten
miles long) called the Marshes of St. Gond, but far from marshy in that
parching heat; and north of that the forest of Epernay. His vanguards
were north of the marshes. But as that Sunday wore on, the Prussian
Guards drove Foch's Angevins and Vendeans of the Ninth Corps back and
occupied the marshes. The Bretons on the east of Foch's line were
obliged to dislodge, and the Moroccans and Forty-second Division had to
yield on Foch's left.

Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, Foch's new army had
given ground practically everywhere.

The next day the German attack became fiercer, and it seemed that more
ground must be yielded.

That was the day when Foch made his memorable deduction: "They are
trying to throw us back with such fury I am sure that