The Fabian strategy was soon and progressively justified. Weaknesses inherent in the German plan began to appear. Every day of their unsuccessful chase aggravated the problem of supplying the armies, removed them from their heavy artillery, stretched and thinned their infantry lines, weakened their liaison, bred weariness and doubt (which were too often drowned in drink), while the French, on the contrary, were shortening their communications, and generally pulling themselves together. “It is the old phenomenon of the wearing down of forces in case of an offensive which we here encounter anew,” says Freytag-Loringhoven. Two or three corps had to be left behind to mask Antwerp and to besiege Maubeuge; the Grand Staff could not altogether resist the Russian scare. There was increasing dislocation: in particular, Kluck had got dangerously out of touch with Bülow. And there was something worse than “wearing down” and dislocation. “Perhaps our programme would not have collapsed,” the historian Meinecke imagines,[80] “if we had carried through our original strategical idea with perfect strictness, keeping our main forces firmly together, and, for the time, abandoning East Prussia.” This cannot be admitted. So far from being pursued more strictly, the original German idea soon could not be pursued at all. Its boldest feature had become inapplicable to circumstances more and more subject to another will. On September 1, when the Somme had been passed, and while Joffre was ordering the extension of the retreat to the Seine and the Aube, Moltke was engaged in changing radically the direction of the marching wing of the invasion, Kluck’s I Army. Failing successively on the Sambre, the Somme, the Oise, and finally stultified by the superior courage that staked the capital itself upon the chance of a victorious recoil farther south, the greatest of all essays in envelopment ended in a recognised fiasco.