“I had such a delightful dream that the whole thing was not true”
Reading edition
The strategic retreat of the French Army, the facility with which the German armies were able to advance from August 25 to September 5, gave our adversaries a feeling of absolute and final superiority, which manifested itself at that time by all the statements gleaned and all the documents seized.
At the moment of the battle of the Marne the first impression was one of failure of comprehension and of stupor. A great number of German soldiers, notably those who fell into our hands during the first days of that battle, believed fully, as at the end of August, that the retreat they were ordered to make was only a means of luring us into a trap. German military opinion was suddenly converted when the soldiers saw that this retreat continued, and that it was being carried out in disorder, under conditions which left no doubt as to its cause and its extent.
French Government Official Report. March, 1915.
