On September 8, 1914, word reached General von Zwehl that the forward drive had failed, that the main armies had been beaten back and that he was to bring up his guns as rapidly as possible to cover the retreat. As rapidly as he could, to General von Zwehl, meant but one thing--to get there! He collected 9,000 reserve troops, which was almost immediately swelled by another 9,000, and with a total of 18,000 troops he started his siege trains for the town of Laon, where Field Marshal von Heeringen had taken up his headquarters. The weather turned bad, rendering the heavy guns extremely difficult to handle, but there could be no delay, no explanations, to General von Zwehl. If a gun was to be brought it was to be brought and that was all about it! Four days and three nights of almost continuous marching is killing. The German commander cared nothing for that. The guns must be kept moving. Could he get them there on time? In the last twenty-four hours of the march, his 18,000 troops covered 41 miles and they arrived in Laon at six o'clock in the morning of September 13, 1914, and were in action an hour later. The problem, therefore, before the English and French at the Aisne, was not the carrying of the river against a disheartened and retreating army, but the carrying of the river against a well-thought-out and forceful plan--a plan, moreover, backed up by the most powerful artillery that the world has ever seen. CHAPTER XXI THE BRITISH AT THE AISNE In the battles of the Marne, the brunt of the fighting had been borne mainly by the French armies, but the major part of work of the battle of the Aisne was borne by the British Expeditionary Force. Sir John French wasted no time. Saturday night, September 12, 1914, was a night of labor for engineers and gunners. The bridge trains belonging to the First and Second Army Corps were ordered to the edge of the river at daybreak, and as soon as the first gleam of dawn appeared in the sky, the heroic effort began. At the risk of seeming a little detailed, in order to understand the somewhat involved maneuvers by which the British won the crossing of the Aisne, instead of dealing with the advance of the British army as a unit, in the manner that was done in discussing the battles of the Marne, their activities will be shown as army corps: the Third Army Corps to the westward, under General Pulteney; the Second Army Corps, under Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, and the First Army Corps to the eastward, under Sir Douglas Haig, all, of course, under the general direction of Sir John French.