13S The Great War compelled to fight for their existence, this time with German cavalry drawn up near St. Quentin on their line of retreat. But this last barrier they brushed aside with comparative ease. At the moment when a Berlin newspaper proclaimed their destruction, they were seventy miles from Paris, safe for the moment, with the road to the French capital open. Such then was the meaning of the last few days of furious fighting. By September i the Germans had driven the Allies from the second line of French defence, beyond the line of the Somme, south of Amiens-St. Quentin and the Laon-La Fere-Rheims barrier, and were now within sixty miles of Paris and still coming on apparently irresistibly. While the world had been looking for some news of a great battle favorable to the Allies just inside the French frontier, French and British forces had been retreating day and night at full speed to es- cape annihilation, to save their left flank, to keep ahead of the German enveloping movement, to elude the net pinned down at one end on the Swiss frontier and the Metz-Thionville forts and carried at the other by the swiftly moving German right, commanded by General von Kluck. It was now plain that the crisis in Northern France could not be long delayed. If the German enveloping movement should fail for tw'O or three days more the Allied left was bound to escape. Indeed, although Paris and London remained in suspense for a few more days, Berlin had already