The occupation of Charleville was a German victory, but was also a German graveyard.  After this historic episode in what has been an unending battle the main body of French withdrew before the Germans, who were now pouring down the valley, and retired to new ground.

It was a retirement which has had one advantage in spite of its acknowledgment of the enemy’s amazing pertinacity.  It has enabled the allied armies to draw closer together, its firm front sweeping around in a crescent from Abbeville, around south of Amiens, and thence in an irregular line to the eastern frontier.

On the map it is at first sight a rather unhappy thing to see that practically the whole of France north of Amiens lies open to German descent from Belgium.  To break up the German Army piecemeal and lure it to its own destruction it was almost necessary to manoeuvre it into precisely the position which it now occupies.  The success of Gen. Pau shows that the allied army is taking the offensive again, and that as a great fighting machine it is still powerful and menacing.

I must again emphasize the difficulty of grasping the significance of a great campaign by isolated incidents, and the danger of drawing important deductions from the misfortunes in one part of the field.  I do so because I have been tempted again and again during the past few days to fall into similar mistakes.  Perhaps in my case it was pardonable.

It is impossible for the armchair reader to realize the psychological effect of being mixed up in the panic of a great people and the retreat from a battlefield.

The last real fighting was taking place at a village called Bapaume all day Friday.  It was very heavy fighting here on the left centre of the great army commanded by Gen. Pau, and leading to a victory which has just been announced officially in France.

A few minutes before midnight Friday, when they came back along the road to Amiens, crawling back slowly in a long, dismal trail, the ambulance wagons laden with the dead and dying, hay carts piled high with saddles and accoutrements, upon which lay, immobile like men already dead, the spent and exhausted soldiers, they passed through the crowds of silent people of Amiens, who only whispered as they stared at the procession.  In the darkness a cuirassier, with head bent upon his chest, stumbled forward, leading his horse, too weak and tired to bear him.

Many other men were leading poor beasts this way, and infantry soldiers, some with bandaged heads, clung to the backs of carts and wagons, and seemed asleep as they shuffled by.

The light from roadside lamps gleamed upon blanched faces and glazed eyes, flashed into caverns of canvas-covered carts, where twisted men lay huddled on straw.  Not a groan came from the carts, but every one knew it was a retreat.

The carts carrying the quick and the dead rumbled by in a long convoy, the drooping heads of the soldiers turned neither right nor left for any greeting with friends.