A public on both sides of the Channel which was unfamiliar with the
elements of military science and history, looked, as soon as it was
allowed to learn the facts about the German advance, for the
investment of Paris and regarded the French capital as the objective
of the German invasion. But Napoleon's maxim that fortresses are
captured on the field of battle was even truer in 1914 than it was a
century earlier; for only the dispersal of the enemy enables an army
to bring up the heavy artillery needed to batter down modern
fortifications, and the great war saw no sieges worth the name
because, the armies being once driven off, no forts could stand
prolonged bombardment by the artillery which followed in the victor's
train. The cities that suffered were not isolated units, they were
merely knotty points in the lines of battle, and there could be no
siege of Paris so long as Joffre's armies kept in line along the Marne
or anywhere in contact with the capital. There was therefore no change
of plan and no mystery when Von Kluck's right veered in the direction
of its advance from south-west to south and then south-east. It was
both avoiding an obstacle and pursuing its original design of
outflanking the Entente's left. Not that Paris was without its
strategic value. It and the line of the Seine impeded the
encirclement, offered a nucleus of resistance, and provided a screen
behind which could be organized a blow against the right flank of the
deflected German march. Still, there was no certainty that Joffre
could hold the Marne, and the French Government took the somewhat
alarming precaution of removing to Bordeaux.

The presence of the British on the French left, the spectacular threat
to Paris, and the comparative proximity of these operations to our own
shores have possibly led to too great an emphasis being placed upon