238 The Great War and eighty from Lagny, the high water mark of the advance of von Kluck. Eastward the German line now ran straight across the plain of Chalons north of Verdun, no longer surrounded. The army of the Crown Prince was retiring from Varennes and the vicious thrust through the barrier forts at St. Mihiel seemed to be frustrated. More than this, after a week of retreat and three more weeks of desperate, tremendous, heroic efforts the German masses had been unable to get on foot again, to step out once more toward Paris. To Noyon and the Craonne Plateau north of Soissons von Kluck had come back on September 12. Von Buelow had been driven north of Rheims in the same general movement, and on October 4 neither the German right nor the centre had regained a single mile of territory on this front. Three weeks of the most confused and bloodiest fighting the Western world had known found the Germans and the Allies facing each other, dead- locked on lines swept by the heaviest artillery of three nations, cut and seamed with the trenches and intrenchments which were daily growing and more and more taking on the character of those lines be- low Richmond where Grant and Lee did battle from July, 1864, to April, 1865. Meantime, to the west and north, new Allied Armies gathered from every quarter of the globe, regiments of Sikhs and Gurkhas touching elbows with Moroccan goums and battalions of black sol-