I met to-day another British officer buying books at Brentano's. He gave me a picturesque description of the German method of advance. "It is the scientific development of the wild, fanatic, life-regardless, condensed rush of the Soudan dervishes," he said. "The Germans mass together all their big field guns. They close in around them serried infantry, goaded on by their wonderful, machine-made, non-commissioned officers, who prick them with sword bayonets, and whenever, from wounds or from sheer exhaustion, men fall out, they are shoved aside, to die by the roadside, or to be trampled under foot, like mechanical tools that have become useless. The German officers and non-commissioned officers are utterly regardless of life. The German flanks are protected by quantities of machine guns placed so close together that their gunners jostle one another. This strange engine of modern warfare creeps on like a monster of the apocalypse, carrying all before it. Aeroplanes hovering over the fronts of the columns direct movements by signalling. The dense, serried mass of infantry offers a splendid target. The losses must have been frightful--exceeding anything recorded in modern war. The German infantry are poor marksmen. They don't know how to shoot. Scarcely any of our men were wounded by bullets. Nearly all the wounds were inflicted by shells." The Marquis de Valtierra has been appointed Spanish Ambassador to the French Republic, in place of the Marquis de Villa Urrutia, who has resigned. The new Ambassador, who has presented his credentials to President Poincare at Bordeaux, and who is expected to arrive in Paris to-morrow, has not followed a diplomatic career. He is a captain-general --a title corresponding with that of an army corps commander in France--and until a few days ago was in command of the military region of Burgos. News that the representatives of France, Great Britain, and Russia have signed an agreement in London not to make peace without previous understanding with the others, meets with popular approval here, and is taken as further evidence that the allies are determined to fight the war to a finish. _Sunday, September 6._ Thirty-fifth day of the war. Ideal September weather, with light easterly wind. Temperature at five P.M. 24 degrees centigrade. The moon is now full. Instead of making a ferocious _attaque brusquee_ on Paris, the four army corps composing the German right wing are moving southeastward, in a supreme effort to crush the left flank of the French center, which is reported to be engaged with the main German forces near Rethel, striving to cut off and surround the French center, and thus achieve a second, but far more gigantic, Sedan. In any event, the Germans are certainly moving away from Paris to the southeast.