The object of our long and arduous marches has been achieved. The principal French troops have been forced to accept battle after having been continually forced back. The great decision is undoubtedly at hand. To-morrow, therefore, the whole strength of the German army, as well as of all that of our army corps, is bound to be engaged all along the line from Paris to Verdun. To save the welfare and honour of Germany I expect every officer and man, notwithstanding the hard and heroic fights of the last few days, to do his duty unswervingly, and to the last breath. Everything depends on the result of to-morrow. This, then, was the spirit in which, on both sides, the mightiest clash of arms until then known to history was entered upon. Across France the battle front stretched for 150 miles. The fight raged, too, for another forty miles along the frontier, for coincidently with the main conflict from Paris to Verdun, the Germans made yet another great effort to break upon the frontier from the east. Fourteen great armies took part in the battle. They numbered altogether more than two millions of men. Taking the two great hosts each as a whole, the numbers were not very unequal. True, the Germans had but six armies as against the eight on the side of the Allies. The German armies, however, were larger. Their strength ranged from 160,000 to 180,000 men as against, on the side of the Allies, an average strength of 120,000.[14] During nearly six days there was, along that far extended battle line, the flash and thunder of more than 7,000 guns. Shells rose and burst like flights of warring meteorites. Masses of infantry moved to the attack. Incessant rifle fire accompanied the bolder bass of the artillery. In and through woods, across fields, in and round blazing villages and burning farms and chateaux they fought; an incessant movement to and fro, amid an unceasing roar--the rage of nations locked in deadly embrace. There were bayonet fights on a vast scale; there were charges by clouds of horsemen; there were furious and murderous combats for points of vantage; there was the capture and recapture of towns; the rush of fire-spitting automobiles below, and the flight of bomb-dropping aeroplanes above. There was the hurried movement of troops and the wild gallop of batteries of guns along the roads. There was, too, the ever-changing kaleidoscope of the masses of transport. Along the great road from Paris to Germany a spectator might have travelled from sunrise to sunset during the whole week of battle, and yet still have found himself in the midst of this seemingly unbounded fury of a world at war. FOOTNOTE: [14] The following may be taken as the _approximate_ strength of the armies engaged, allowing on the one hand for war wastage, and on the other for a filling up from reserves, which on the part of the Allies had been completed:-- GERMANS.