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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERICS._)

In _Forty Days in 1914_ (CONSTABLE), Major-General Sir F. MAURICE does
more than revive our fading recollections of the retreat from Mons and
the marvellous recovery on the Marne. A careful study of the German
documents relating to VON KLUCK'S dash for Paris has led the author to
form a new theory to account for the German defeat. Hitherto we have
been asked to believe that VON KLUCK'S fatal change of direction, just
when he seemed to have Paris at his mercy, was due to an urgent call
for assistance from the CROWN PRINCE. General MAURICE holds, on the
contrary, that it was deliberately adopted, at a moment when the CROWN
PRINCE'S army was undefeated, in the belief that the French Fifth Army
could be enveloped and destroyed, in which event "the whole French
line would be rolled up and Paris entered after a victory such as
history had never yet recorded." Thus, not for the first time, a too
rigid adherence to MOLTKE'S theory of envelopment proved disastrous to
the Germans' chances of success. It had first caused them to invade
Belgium, and so brought Britain into the War at the very outset; it
had next caused VON KLUCK to continue his westward sweep after Mons at
a juncture when a vigorous pursuit by his cavalry might have turned
the British retreat into a rout; and finally it caused him to execute
the notoriously dangerous manoeuvre of changing front before an
unbeaten foe, and to give JOFFRE the opportunity for which he had
been patiently waiting. The fact was that VON KLUCK did not think the
British were unbeaten. He could not conceive that men who had just
endured such a harassing experience as the seven days' continuous