Such a term can
only rightly be applied to conditions where the opposing powers
each have but one organized army in the field, and these armies
meet in a pitched battle. None the less, the several actions which
are known as the Battles of the Marne may be considered as decisive,
to the extent that they decided the limit of the German offensive
at that point. The German General Staff, taking the ordinary and
obvious precautions in the case of a possible repulse, chose and
fortified in the German rear positions to which its forces might
fall back in the event of retreat. These prepared positions had
a secondary contingent value for the Germans in view of the grave
Russian menace that might call at any moment for a transfer of
German troops from the western to the eastern front.
The Battle of the Marne stopped the advance of the main German army
on that line, forcing it back.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF THE MARNE--BEGINNING ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1914]
The scene of the battle ground is one of the most famous in Europe,
not even the plains of Belgium possessing a richer historical
significance than that melancholy plain, the Champagne-Pouilleuse,
upon whose inhospitable flats rested for centuries the curse of a
prophecy, that there would the fate of France be decided, a prophecy
of rare connotation of accuracy, for it refrained from stating what
that fate should be. Yet the historic sense is amplified even more
by remembrance than by prophecy, for in the territory confronting
that huge arc on which 1,400,000 German and Austrian soldiers lay
encamped, awaiting what even the German generals declared to be
"the great decision," there lies, on the old Roman road running
from Chalons a vast oval mound, known to tradition as "the Camp of
Attila.
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