Each mile of the retreat was an agony of yielding further French territory to the enemy. In some places French soldiers marched past their own homes knowing the Germans would enter them next day. “We left Blombay on August 27,” wrote a cavalry captain with the Fifth Army. “Ten minutes later it was occupied by the Uhlans.”
Units that had been in heavy combat marched in silence, out of step, without songs. Haggard men, parched and hungry, some bitter, muttered against their officers or whispered of treason. Every French position had been betrayed to the German artillery spotters, it was said in the Xth Corps of Lanrezac’s Army which had lost 5,000 men on the Sambre.
”The men drag themselves along, their faces marked by a terrible exhaustion,” wrote an infantry captain in this corps. “They have just completed a two days’ march of 62 kilometers after a sharp rearguard action.” But that night they sleep, and in the morning “it is extraordinary how a few hours’ sleep revives them. They are new men.” They ask why they are retreating, and the captain makes a sharp speech in “a cold assured voice.” He tells them they will fight again “and show the Germans we have teeth and claws.”
Source:
Tuchman, Barbara W. "Retreat." The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962. 378. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Hanotaux, V, 221-22.
Hanotaux, VII, 212, 268.
Hanotaux, VIII, 76-8.
Further Reading:
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