These dispositions commanded the roads and approaches along which the enemy must advance in order to obtain touch with the main body, and they were calculated both to break up the unity of his onset and to lay him open to effective attack while deploying for battle. They were, in fact, the same tactics which, in resisting the onset of a superior force, Wellington employed at Waterloo by holding in advance of his main line Hugomont and La Haye Sainte for a like purpose. Sir John French had foreseen that, taught at Mons the cost of a frontal assault against British troops, General von Kluck would now seek to employ his greater numerical strength and weight of guns by throwing that strength as far as he could against the flanks of the British, hoping to crush the British line together and so destroy it. That, in fact, was what General von Kluck did try to do. In this attack five German army corps were engaged. The German General concentrated the main weight of his artillery, comprising some 112 batteries of field guns and howitzers, against the British left. The terrific bombardment was followed up by infantry attacks, in which mass formations were once more resorted to. Evidently it was thought that against such a strength in guns the British could not possibly hold their lines, and that the infantry, completely demoralised, must be so shaken as to fire wildly, rendering an onslaught by superior forces of the German infantry an assured and sweeping victory. For a second time these calculations miscarried. As they rushed forward, expecting but feeble opposition, the hostile infantry masses were shot down by thousands. The spectacle of such masses was certainly designed to terrify. It failed to terrify. In this connection it is apposite to recall that the destruction of Baker Pasha's army at Suakim by a massed rush of Arab spearmen long formed with the newer school of German tacticians a classic example of the effect of such charges on _British_ troops. No distinction seems to have been made between the half-trained Egyptian levies led by Baker Pasha and fully trained British infantry. The two are, in a military sense, worlds apart. Yet German theorists, their judgment influenced by natural bias, ignored the difference. Nor was the fortune of the attacks upon the British right any better. The defence of Landrecies by the Guards Brigade forms one of the most heroic episodes of the war. Before it was evacuated the village had become a German charnel-house. Hard pressed as they were at both extremities of their line, the British during these two days fought to a standstill an army still nearly three times as large as their own.