NEWS OF THE WEEK.
IT would be most unwise, nay, worse, ignoble, to begin shouting about victory merely because our gallant Army has not been destroyed, and because the Germans have been checked in Northern France and to some extent repelled. Still, there is this week ground not merely for considerable Satisfaction in the present, but for good hopes of the future. When we wrote last week the mighty German wave with its spume crest of 1:Thlans was still rolling on, and it looked as if this week we should have had to chronicle that it had lapped the base of the Paris forts. On Monday, however, came the news that the force of this wave at least had been spent, and that not even the edge of the foam would touch Paris. On Tuesday we received the somewhat mysterious intelligence that the German columns had turned to the left and the eastward and were marching away from Paris. That was apparently the last flutter of the encircling tactics, for on Wednesday we learnt that the German right—General von 1Cluck's army—was falling back. On Thursday what had been hope became assurance, for the news showed that the enemy were falling back all along their vast battle front from Verdun to Paris, and especially on their extreme right, and had already evacuated most of the ground south of the Marne. Best of all, the newspapers chronicled the fact that the Allies had taken the offensive, and that in our section of the theatre of war the British troops had advanced twenty-five miles, were across the Marne, were taking guns and prisoners and pressing the enemy hard.
