There was no place for Horace with the British, and at sunrise he was on his motor-cycle on his way back to his friends in the Fourth French Army, for he saw that the driving force of the battle was not at any one point, but along the whole line, and he felt he could be of more use where he was already known. The retreat, as he passed through it, was vastly more orderly and methodical than the retreat of the French after Givet and Dinant, but, at the same time, its slow and methodical methods resulted in a heavy loss of life. The German jaws bit and tore at the English troops. They hurled brigades of men against companies and engulfed them. But they could not break the line. The German artillery, advancing, deluged the lines with bullet and shell; the British artillery, retreating, necessarily limbered up much of the time for the retreat, could not reply adequately. One hundred shells to one were hurled at what had been called by the Kaiser "Britain's contemptible little army." But they could not break the line. Clouds of cavalry swept upon the flank, picking off the English by ones and twos, by dozens and by hundreds. They sacrificed themselves valiantly in an attempt to force their way through that khaki-clad resistance. But they could not break the line. Morning, noon and night, dusk, midnight and dawn, Von Kluck drove the attack, leaving scant time for food, less time for rest and practically no time for sleep, seeking to wear down human resistance by sheer exhaustion and fatigue. But he could not break the line. Horace found the same terrific pressure on the Fourth Army, forced back by Von Hausen and the Duke of Würtemberg. He had feared to find a rout, remembering the breaking condition in which he had left the army, but he found it reformed, reënforced, strong as ever and filled with a grim determination to save Paris at all costs. The men of his old battery greeted him with a shout. "Where have you been?" they cried. "Tell us the news." Horace told all that he knew, or rather, all that he thought he ought to tell, describing the desperate though resistant condition of the British expeditionary force. "But they're retreating, too," said a gun-layer, gloomily, "always retreating. Are we going to give those dogs of Boches all of France?" So it seemed as day after day passed by. Back, back, and ever back. Retreat amid the wounded, retreat in hopeless rear-guard actions with dead on every side, retreat on roads crowded with homeless and hopeless refugees fleeing anywhere away from the advancing horror of war, retreat without food, retreat without sleep, retreat in rain, in mud, in blazing heat, in choking thirst, retreat under the reproachful eyes of deserted women, retreat under the stinging shame of defeat, retreat until the heart was as weary as the feet and death would be a boon. Retreat over a front of 200 miles, with every road, every street, every lane, every by-path surging with misery, crowded with panic.