Fall of Giants

The cabbies leaned against their cars, smoking pipes and talking animatedly, waiting for instructions. Every driver had a different theory as to why they were there.

Eventually Dupuys came out of the school and across the street with a loud-hailer in one hand and a sheaf of army requisition slips in the other. He climbed on the bonnet of a taxi, and the drivers fell quiet.

“The military commander of Paris requires five hundred taxis to go from here to Blagny,” he shouted through the megaphone.

The drivers stared at him in incredulous silence.

“There each car will pick up five soldiers and drive them to Nanteuil.”

Nanteuil was thirty miles east and very close to the front line. The drivers began to understand. They looked at one another, nodding and grinning. Fitz guessed they were pleased to be part of the war effort, especially in such an unusual way.

“Please take one of these forms before you leave and fill it out in order to claim payment on your return.”

There was a buzz of reaction. They were going to get paid! That clinched their support.

“When five hundred cars have left, I will give instructions for the next five hundred. Vive Paris! Vive la France!”

The drivers broke into wild cheering. They mobbed Dupuys for the forms. Fitz, delighted, helped distribute the papers.

Soon the little cars began to leave, turning around in front of the great building and heading across the bridge in the sunshine, sounding their horns in enthusiasm, a long bright red lifeline to the forces on the battlefront.

{V}

The British took three days to march twenty-five miles. Fitz was mortified. Their advance had been largely unopposed: if they had moved faster, they might have struck a decisive blow.

However, on the morning of Wednesday, September 9, he found Galliéni’s men in an optimistic mood. Von Kluck was retreating. “The Germans are scared!” said Colonel Dupuys.

Fitz did not believe the Germans were scared, and the map offered a more plausible explanation. The British, slow and timid though they were, had marched into a gap that had appeared between the German First and Second armies, a gap made when von Kluck pulled his forces westward to face the attack from Paris. “We’ve found a weak point, and we’re driving a wedge into it,” Fitz said, and there was a tremor of hope in his voice.

He told himself to calm down. The Germans had won every battle so far. On the other hand, their supply lines were stretched, their men were exhausted, and their numbers had been reduced by the need to send reinforcements to East Prussia. By contrast the French in this zone had received heavy reinforcements and had virtually no supply lines to worry about, being on home ground.

Fitz’s hopes went into reverse when the British halted five miles north of the river Marne. What was Sir John stopping for? He had encountered hardly any opposition!

But the Germans seemed not to notice the timidity of the Brits, for they continued to retreat, and hopes rose again in the lycée.

As the shadows of the trees lengthened outside the school windows, and the last reports of the day came in, a sense of suppressed jubilation began to permeate Galliéni’s staff. By the end of the day the Germans were on the run.

Fitz could hardly believe it. The despair of a week ago had turned to hope. He sat on a chair that was too small for him and stared at the map on the wall. Seven days ago the German line had seemed like a springboard for the launch of their final attack; now it looked like a wall at which they had been turned back.

When the sun went down behind the Eiffel Tower, the Allies had not won a victory, exactly, but for the first time in weeks the German advance had ground to a halt.

Dupuys embraced Fitz, then kissed him on both cheeks; and for once Fitz did not mind at all.

“We have stopped them,” said Galliéni, and to Fitz’s surprise, tears gleamed behind the old general’s pince-nez. “We have stopped them.”

{VI}

Soon after the Battle of the Marne, both sides began to dig trenches.

The heat of September turned into the cold, depressing rain of October. The stalemate at the eastern end of the line spread irresistibly west, like a paralysis creeping through the body of a dying man.