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raucously:
‘Siegreich woll’n wir Frankreich schlagen,
  Sterben als ein tapf’rer Held.’
    Perhaps a little more than other young men of Europe, after the long years of bourgeois prosperity they were yearning for the ‘great experience’. As one of them noted, ‘the war had entered into us like wine. There is no lovelier death in the world… anything rather than rest at home.’ The spectacle of the first shattered corpses fascinated them, for ‘the horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us to the war.’ To their Crown Prince, watching them pass, they were ‘joyous German soldiers with sparkling eyes’.
    On the other side, young men filled with a mighty lust for revenge were marching up at that rapid staccato pace, accompanied by the regimental music and with the rather more melodious refrain of ‘ Mourir pour la Patrie est le sort le plus beau’ on their lips. Magnificent specimens, these French soldiers of 1914, thought the soldiers of General French’s army, repeatedly astonished to find them bigger and tougher men than themselves. They ripped up the frontier posts in Alsace and sent them to be laid upon the grave of Déroulède. Then the enemy was located. The trumpeters sounded the call that sent a thrill more heady than wine through French veins:
Y a la goutte à boire là-haut!
Y a la goutte à boire!
    All along the frontier the infantrymen in their red trousers and thick, blue overcoats, carrying heavy packs and long, unwieldy bayonets, broke into the double behind their white-gloved officers. Many sang the Marseillaise. In the August heat, sometimes the heavily encumbered French attacked from a distance of nearly half a mile from the enemy. Never have machine-gunners had such a heyday. The French stubble-fields became transformed into gay carpets of red and blue. Splendid cuirassiers in glittering breastplates of another age hurled their horses hopelessly at the machine gunsthat were slaughtering the infantry. It was horrible, and horribly predictable. In that superb, insane courage of 1914 there was something slightly reminiscent of the lemmings swimming out to sea. But it was not war.
    For a whole week, as the censors released news of the capture of Mulhouse while suppressing such unpleasant details as casualties, France held her breath and thought Plan XVII might succeed. Triumphantly Le Matin proclaimed, ‘Plus un soldat allemand en France!’ But, at Joffre’s headquarters, courier after courier was arriving with news of identical disasters from all parts of the front. In the two weeks that the terrible Battle of the Frontiers lasted, France lost over 300,000 men in killed, wounded, and missing, and 4,778 officers — representing no less than one-tenth of her total officer strength. De Castelnau’s Second Army, which was to have led the advance to the Rhine, reeled back on Nancy almost in a rout; in it, the elite XX Corps commanded by Foch was particularly hard hit. To the North, the swinging German right wing pushed the French and the B.E.F. back to the Marne. In 1870, such catastrophes might well have led to a débâcle as disastrous as either of the Sedans, but this was not the France of either Louis Napoleon or Lebrun. Von Kluck committed his historic blunder of wheeling inwards, on his own responsibility, thereby exposing the First Army’s flank to the newly constituted army guarding Paris. Galliéni, the governor, spotted what had happened; Joffre made the retreating armies turn about; and the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ came to pass. 1 With it the Germans lost their one chance of an absolute victory (it had been a close thing) though it took the Allies another four bloody years to prove it to them. Their mighty impetus finally checked, they fell back, but the French were too exhausted to turn the retreat into a rout. Then, in the last flicker of the war of movement, there took place the side-stepping motion towards the Channel, with each side