And even as he watched the whole huge invasion swerved.
Out through Paris and out and around beyond Paris, other men in dim blue coats swung out in long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon Von Kluck like blue wings.

Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a few secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging round on him, dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate angle, to smash it in the centre as with a hammer.

It was less desperate than it seemed; for he counted, and might well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of him, which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind.

Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained, dust-hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner.

But even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the charge; and the English went forward through the wood that is called Crecy, and stamped it with their seal for the second time, in the highest moment of all the secular history of man.
But it was not now the Crecy in which English and French knights had met in a more coloured age, in a battle that was rather a tournament.