At the conclusion of the conference, no positive information having been received of the commencement of the retirement, the Commander-in-Chief himself set out for Le Cateau; but the congestion of the roads with Belgian refugees, etc., made progress so slow that he had not accomplished half the distance before he found that his orders had been carried out and the retirement was in progress. During the early part of the day, however, Sir H. Smith-Dorrien had, for the reason given above, waited at the Le Gateau position to engage the pursuing Germans. Of the three divisions of infantry thus engaged, the Fifth lay on the right, the Third in the centre, and the Fourth faced outwards on the left: the whole occupying the ridge south of the Cambrai-Le Cateau road, on the line Haucourt-Caudry-Beaumont-Le Cateau. The Nineteenth Infantry Brigade was in reserve and the cavalry operated on the flanks. With both flanks exposed, with three divisions of infantry to the enemy’s seven, and faced by the massed artillery of four army corps,--an odds of four or five to one,--the Second Corps and Fourth Division prepared to make a stand. A few hours’ sleep, and at dawn, with a roar of guns, the battle opened. That the day was critical, that it was all or nothing, was realized by all ranks. Everything was thrown into the scale; nothing was held back. Regiments and batteries, with complete self-abandonment, faced hopeless duels at impossible ranges; brigades of cavalry on the flanks boldly threatened divisions; and in the half-shelter of their trenches the infantry, withering but never budging, grimly dwindled before the German guns. It was our first experience on a large scale of modern artillery in mass. For the first six hours the guns never stopped. To our infantry it was a time of stubborn and almost stupefied endurance, broken by lucid intervals of that deadly musketry which had played such havoc with the Germans at Mons. To our artillery it was a duel, and perhaps of all the displays of constancy and devotion in a battle where every man in every arm of the service did his best, the display of the gunners was the finest. For they accepted the duel quite cheerfully, and made such sport with the enemy’s infantry that even their masses shivered and recoiled. By midday, however, many of our batteries were out of action, and the enemy infantry had advanced almost to the main Cambrai-Le Gateau road, behind which our men, in their pathetic civilian trenches, were quietly waiting.