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190 The Great War a new concentration, replenish ammunition stores now exhausted and presently undertake a new offen- sive movement toward Paris. Could they do this, much of the profit of the Battle of the Marne would be lost. On the other hand, if the pursuit were pressed with complete success the Germans might be driven north to the very frontier of France, to the line of the Meuse and the foot hills of the Ardennes with their right stretching from the Sambre to the Scheldt, that is to the position on which the first battle of the campaign had been fought and the German invasion of France made possible. It was even conceivable, believed likely in Paris and Lon- don in the second week in September that the Ger- man retreat might be turned into a rout, that the destruction which overtook the Grand Army after Waterloo might be the fate of the Kaiser's vast force. This hope, it was little more, was wholly shat- tered when on September 12 von Kluck successfully passed the Aisne. The reasons for this are to be found in the examination of the topographical cir- cumstances of the position which he now took up, a position which it was soon to be discovered had been prepared by the German General Staff against just such a reverse as they had now suffered. Coming south or west toward Paris, that is from Belgium or Germany, some eighty miles distant from the French capital there rise out of the plains a

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