The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-03
Counting the Losses

London Cable to the New York Sun: The Times in a special Sunday clifton published at ' o'clock Sunday morning
 prints a long story from it's special corre- spondent at Amiens, mainly along tho lines of the dispatch from the Suns and
 London Daily Mails correspondent re-
 garding the seriousness of the situation
 in northern France. .The Times corre- spondent says:
 we have to count the losses take stock of the situation and set our teeth.'' He continues:
 "Along the Sambre and in the angle of
 the Sambre and the Mouse the French, after days of long, gallant fighting, broke. Namur fell and General Joffre was forced to order a retreat along the whole line.
 The Germans, fulfilling the one best of all
 the precepts of war, never gave the re- treating allies a single moments rest.
 The pursuit was immediate, relentless, unresting. Aeroplanes, Zeppelins. ar ! mored motor cars, cavalry were looseG like arrows from a bow and served im- mediately to harrass the retiring columns and also to keep the German staff fully informed of the movements of the allies 'The British fell back through Laval
 on the front between valenciennes and
 Maubeuge, then through Le Quesney, where there was desperate fighting, southward. Continually the regiments were grievously injured and the broken army fought it's way desperately. At
 many stands it was forced backward, ever backward, by the sheer unconquer-
 able mass and numbers of an enemy pre- pared to throw away three or four men for the life of every Britisher.
 To the Sound of Guns Tonight l write to the sound of guns. All the afternoon guns were going along the eastern roads. A German aeroplane flew over us this morning and vas brought crashing down. A royal engi- neers chauffeur told me that the axle of
 his car had broken and he had had to
 abandon the machine. He had scarcely
 left the car when it was blown up.
 'In scattered units, with the enemy ever
 on its heels, the Fourth division all that
 was left of 10000 fine troops, streamed
 southward.
 Our losses were great, and 1 have seen
 the broken bits of many regiments, but
 let me repeat there is no failure of discip-
 line, ro panic. no throwing up of the
 sponge. Every temper is sweet and
 nerves do not show. A group of men, a
 dozen more or less, arrives under the
 command of whomsoever is entitled to command. The men, battered with march, ing, ought to be weak with hunger. for no
 commissariat could cope with such case,
 but they are steady and cheerful and
 wherever they arrive they make straight
 for the proper authority to report 'and to
 seek news of their regiment.
 Apparently every division of the ex- peditionary force has been in. action. Some lost nearly all their officers. Reg iments were broken to bits, but the the fragments together. Colossal Losses
 "One thing is clear-the colossal character of the German losses. At first I was sceptical of these; now lam convinced. It also is clear that all though the French staff knew that so perfected as to force Germany to turn the flank to find weak spot, and although they knew also that not for nothing did Germany antagonize England and outrage international lopinion by violating the neutrality of lBalgium. nevertheless they underesti- mated the force of the German blow through Belgium. All estimates of the humber of German corps in Belgium need revision. and behind the screen of I.Alsace-Lorraine there probably are far fewer than had been supposed. else, per Ihape Muelhausen would not have had to be retaken twice.
 'sThe German commanders in the north advance men as if there was an