The driven and defeated line stood at last almost under the walls of
Paris; and the world waited for the doom of the city. The gates seemed
to stand open; and the Prussian was to ride into it for the third and
the last time: for the end of its long epic of liberty and equality was
come. And still the very able and very French individual on whom rested
the last hope of the seemingly hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a
rock, in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his bulldog figure. He
had called his bewildered soldiers back when they had broken the
invasion at Guise; he had silently digested the responsibility of
dragging on the retreat, as in despair, to the last desperate leagues
before the capital; and he stood and watched. And even as he watched the
whole huge invasion swerved.

Out through Paris and out and around beyond Paris, other men in dim blue
coats swung out in long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon Von
Kluck like blue wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a
few secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging round on him,
dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate angle, to smash it in the
centre as with a hammer. It was less desperate than it seemed; for he
counted, and might well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of
the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of
him, which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn
leaves before a whirlwind. Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained,
dust-hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner. But
even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the
charge; and the English went forward through the wood that is called
Creçy, and stamped it with their seal for the second time, in the
highest moment of all the secular history of man.

But it was not now the Creçy in which English and French knights had met