Following the track of General von Kluck's army, Mr. Gerald Morgan, another special correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_, wrote:--
At Vareddes horses and men littered the ground. Semi-permanent entrenchments had been suddenly abandoned. Alongside the German artillery positions I saw piles of unexploded shells which the Germans had abandoned in their hurry. These shells were in wicker baskets, three to a basket. The Germans had had there many batteries of field guns, both three-inch and five-inch, and had meant evidently to make a determined resistance. But their artillery positions were plainly so badly placed that the French were able to blow them, literally to drench them, out. An avenue of large trees along the roadside, trees which the Germans hoped to use as a shelter, had been torn to pieces and flung to the ground by the French artillery as by strokes of lightning. The German dead had almost all been hit by shells or by shrapnel. A German aeroplane, brought down during the engagement, lay in the fields like a big dead bird.
I followed the line of the German retreat as far as a village called May. From the number of accoutrements thrown away along the road I judged the retreat was in bad order and greatly hurried.
The scene on the battlefield was rather terrible. There was no one to bury the dead, for the French army had gone on in pursuit, and the villagers had almost all left the country some days before.
The German infantry position was in a valley. The entrenchments had undoubtedly been dug with a view to maintaining them permanently, but the fault lay in the artillery position. The German guns--evidently a large number--had been placed on a ridge behind the infantry position. This ridge was exposed to a fire from the French artillery on a ridge opposite, a fire which completely silenced the German guns, and left the German infantry to its fate. Few of the infantry escaped.
On the day after the Germans had been driven across the Marne, Mr. Wm. Maxwell, driving into the, at ordinary times, pleasant little town of Meaux, found it deserted:--
Its houses are standing; its churches and public buildings are untouched, yet its streets are silent, its windows shuttered, and its doors closed. It might be a plague-stricken city, forsaken by all except a few Red Cross nurses, who wait for the ambulances bringing the wounded from the battlefield.