When the little party of dragoons once more reached the road, at the level crossing where it cuts the line from Epinal to Nancy, it was still covered with a dense mass of fugitives. This time it was not merely a procession of carts but of the army itself, the soldiers of the XVth and XVIth Army Corps. It was the final stage of the retreat which had begun after their defeat in front of Morhange and Saarburg by the armies of Metz, of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, and of General von Heeringen. For two days, by all the roads that cross the frontier between Vic and Réchicourt and meet on the south-east side of Lunéville, they had come crowding along to this harbour of refuge, the angle between the Mortagne and the Meurthe, where they were to find sanctuary behind the curtain of troops prepared by General Dubail and General Bigot. Infantry of the line, chasseurs, artillery, young men of the active army, territorials, troops of peasants, women and children and old men, some in carts and some on foot, all mixed up in inextricable confusion with the soldiers and regimental wagons, the drivers flogging their worn-out horses in the vain effort to make them move faster, the men on foot, almost as many of them wounded as not, too tired or too weak to get out of the way, marching anyhow without any formation or any attempt to keep to their own companies, splashing along in a slough of mud, wet to the bone by the ceaseless rain, without discipline, without courage, almost without thought, the tragic procession filed slowly by, away from the enemy, away from the frontier that they had been sent to defend. But only for the time being, and only for two days. That was the marvel of it. By their failure—in face of the impossible task by which they were confronted—they had thrown the whole scheme of the eastern campaign out of gear. The XXth Army Corps under General Foch, which had the position on their left at Morhange, was forced to retire with them, and worse still would have befallen the corps from the Midi and the Pyrenees if it had not been for the steadying influence of the men of Lorraine and the magnificent rearguard action which they fought as they retreated steadily and in perfect order to their position in front of Nancy, marching by the roads to the north of Lunéville and the Meurthe. Much the same thing had happened on the right, as we have already seen. The advanced regiments of Dubail’s army, finding their left uncovered, were also obliged to give up their successful offensive and fall back on Baccarat, Raon l’Etape, and St. Dié, leaving to the enemy the strategical advantage of the positions on the crests of the Vosges, and at the same time prolonging their line westwards to the angle between the Mortagne and the Meurthe, so as to stand between the fugitives and the pursuing Germans and join in the one object that now mattered—the defence of Nancy.