134 The Great War rier, that they would have to go back to the forts of Paris. For the AlHes this was the gloomiest mo- ment in the early weeks of the war. Paris and London aside from brief and vague statements pre- served complete silence officially. This silence was in grim contrast with Berlin, which daily reported new progress and as a climax to glowing bulletins, one German newspaper on August 29 reported that the storm beaten little British army driven south from Cambrai had been met on its line of retreat near St. Quentin by masses of German cavalry, dis- persed and destroyed. The attention of the world was then concentrated upon the desperate effort of the Germans to repeat in 19 14 the successes of 1870, but on a far more gigantic scale and all through the week following the Allied defeat at Mons and Charleroi, the ulti- mate success of their great enveloping movement seemed imminent.