Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was the retreat that upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at Lunéville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put Nancy in peril. Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Dié northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the great sweep on Paris. The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such great moral effects upon the French and the German minds) was, by the 2nd of September, as follows:-- The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news. LEMBERG. The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke was delivered in the West. That is the largest view of the matter.