The floods had not reached Soissons, so the French were able to pour reinforcements into the city. A great struggle took place at the village of St. Paul, on the right bank of the river, about a mile to the east of Soissons. The Germans advanced in dense masses, and won the village; but the French artillery speedily drove them out, and von Kluck found that he could advance no further.
The Germans trumpeted abroad this little success as a smashing victory; but it was of no particular consequence, for they had only slightly improved their position, and in doing so had suffered a loss of at least 10,000 men. It was not so much German guns and rifles that drove the French from the spurs which they had won as the flooding of the river. Nature had fought for the Germans, but still they could not "make good." Some writers thought that it was very clever of von Kluck to postpone his big counter-attack until his enemies had a swollen river and flooded fields behind them; but the fact was that he could not attack earlier, because his reinforcements were late in arriving. The Germans owed their success not to good generalship, but to good luck.
[Footnote 10: Unnamed hills are numbered on the map by their height above sea-level. Thus Hill 132 means a hill which is 132 metres, or 440 ft., in elevation.]
WINTER FIGHTING IN CHAMPAGNE, THE ARGONNE, AND THE VOSGES.
We now come to that part of the French front on which the most successful attempts of the Allies were made during January and February. You have already heard of the little river Suippe, a tributary of the Aisne. Between the upper waters of this river and the Forest of the Argonne there is a chalk plain, dotted with plantations of firs and crossed by rolling downs. In many respects it resembles Salisbury Plain, and for many years has been put to the same use. Before the war it was the great training ground of French troops and the scene of their yearly manoeuvres. The plain is sparsely populated; scattered farms and straggling homesteads are few and far between, and lack of villages means lack of roads. After heavy rain the whole district is a sea of shallow mud; but the ground does not become water-logged, and as soon as the rain ceases the ground dries very quickly. Operations during the winter were therefore possible. General Joffre decided to nibble more vigorously on this plain than elsewhere.