I looked up. "Yes," I said, "because at the moment...." "Well?" "What are we doing?" He scrutinised my face. "Follow up your idea." "We are shutting ourselves into a camp." "Does that distress you?" "I may be a bad judge." He twirled his moustache. "Really! You too, you too! You look at things like that?" I had him--I had led him on to the point from which I knew he would launch out. "If the worst came to the worst, and Paris was stormed, there would only be one thing for us, the troops collected here, to do. That would be to stick in the trenches covering the approach to the forts, and be killed, down to the last man!... For that matter I think they'd be in a bit of a hole with our army on their flank. But that's not at all the position. For four days, Dreher, four days you understand, their new objective has been visible. They are inclining towards the south-east. They are set on surrounding all our forces in the field. Under these circumstances, I think--it seems to me--that a decisive movement...." This time he threw restraint to the winds. He began by explaining all he had been able to follow of the operations since the beginning. In a lump, of course, but how much I valued that first sight I had had of things as a whole, at a time when I was sighing after light from the depths of my ignorance. It was in vain that I had instinctively put myself on guard against the pretensions of an officer in a subordinate position. I was forced to admire the masterly way in which he stated the facts, the precision and lucidity of his words, which would have made of him a remarkable professor of military history. He summed up for me, in a few words, the action in the North which until then had been shrouded in a thick mist for me. Our premature offensive, the strength of the German right under Von Kluck exceeding all expectations--our English Allies overcome in spite of heroic efforts--the enemy's wing set in motion and hurled towards Paris by forced marches which it was impossible to hinder in spite of terrible sacrifices--our men falling back, fighting day and night, on to the outskirts of the capital. That was last week's balance sheet. To-day the enemy had given up the idea of Paris, provisionally and was applying the new principle: the search for, and the annihilation of, the hostile armies in the field. It was a far-reaching conception. Just think of the gigantic forces they had hurled into Lorraine too, which had just forced us back in a few days from Sarrebourg and Morhange to the St. Dié-Nancy front. It was a colossal enveloping movement. Our front pierced towards Neufchâteau, as the principal German mass fell back by Châlons--our communications cut, that meant all our forces in the east, and the whole system of our fortified towns caught at one haul, three-quarters of our strength destroyed, the war virtually over. "Then?" I said panting in spite of myself.