The second advantage gained has already been indicated; it consisted in the attainment of a concave front resting upon the entrenched camps of Paris and Verdun, and by them guarded against any sudden manœuvre of envelopment. Intermediately, this front lay across the heights between the Marne and the Seine, along the chief system of main lines and highroads running eastward from the capital, those of Paris–Nancy. This 200-miles stretch of country, so typically French in character and history, loosely united by the Marne and the tributaries it carries into the Seine on the threshold of the capital——an agricultural country whose only large cities, Rheims and Châlons, were in the enemy’s hands——falls into four natural divisions, corresponding with the Allied left (west), left-centre, right-centre, and right (east). The western region, between the suburbs of Paris and the gully holding the little river Ourcq and its canal, is the Ile-de-France and the Valois, rolling farmlands of beet and corn, with some parks, bordered on the north by the forests of Chantilly and Villers-Cotterets, and on the south by the broad valley of the Marne. A landscape most intimately French in its rich, spacious quietude, in the old-time solidity of its villages and their people, in the gracious dignity of its châteaux and ruined abbeys, with Meaux bells pealing across the brown slopes to the sister cathedral of Senlis, and both looking east to the giant donjon of La Ferté-Milon. This is the battlefield of the Ourcq, where Kluck was rounded up by Maunoury and the British. The ancient cathedral and market-town of Meaux marks its limit near the junction of the lesser and greater rivers. East of the Ourcq this district becomes more crumpled in its rise towards the Montagne de Rheims; while, south of the Marne, extends the larger and richer country of Brie, famous for its cheeses, its _fertés_, erstwhile baronial strongholds, and for the scenes of some of Napoleon’s greatest victories. In structure, this is a broken triangular plateau, cut by westward-flowing streams (the Marne, Petit Morin, and Grand Morin), bounded on the south by the Seine and Aube, and rising eastward to the Montagne de Reims and the Falaises de Champagne, where it falls abruptly. Coulommiers, Château-Thierry, and Provins are substantial market-towns, and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Montmirail, and Sézanne smaller centres of rural life. This wide plateau of Brie, the Allied left-centre, was the starting-point of the British recoil, and the field contested by d’Espérey’s Army against Von Bülow.