The best way to arrive at a fairly clear idea of the operations that followed is, I think, to leave for the present everything that happened north of the Bayon-Lunéville road, culminating in the Battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy, and to follow first the German advance south of the line between Lunéville and the Donon, in the department of the Vosges. [Illustration: Record Press phot. GENERAL DUBAIL. ] Nothing had happened so far to cause any alteration in the grand plan of campaign conceived by the general staff at Berlin before the war. Its execution had only been delayed (for about a fortnight) first by the unexpected resistance of Liége and the Belgian army, and secondly by the Alsace-Lorraine offensive. Now that these two obstacles had been disposed of the German armies were able to set themselves once again to the task of rounding up the French and English in the neighbourhood of Châlons-sur-Marne, to be operated by a simultaneous “hook” or encircling movement from the north and from the south, and so to leave open the way to Paris. From the beginning Metz was meant to be the pivot of the double advance through Belgium and through Lorraine. It was, so to speak, to represent the hinge of a pair of compasses. The left or lower leg of the compasses was composed of the armies of von Strantz, von Heeringen, and the Crown Prince of Bavaria, those which acted against Alsace and Lorraine. The right or upper leg consisted of the remaining armies, from the Crown Prince of Prussia’s to von Kluck’s. The two legs were to be gradually squeezed together till they crushed the French and English armies between them, and then—and not till then, in my opinion—Paris was to be invested. As the war went on the left leg of the compasses, which was at first meant to stretch as far as Belfort, was gradually shortened, bit by bit, under stress of circumstances. At the date at which we have arrived it only reached as far as Epinal, a little later still as far as Nancy, and when it was found that here too the resistance to the squeezing in process could not be overcome, the original left leg was discarded, or at least left where it was, and a fresh and still shorter one forged in Metz, and thrust out to St. Mihiel. But that was not till later. In the fourth week of August the original plan had not yet been modified. The part allotted to the armies commanded by the Crown Prince of Bavaria in the east was still to break through the line of frontier fortresses, and join hands with the other Crown Prince’s army somewhere near Bar le Duc, in order to carry out the encircling movement from the south.