GAULLE Charles de. L. A. S., Lyon 14 September 1914, to his father Henri de Gaulle; 8 pages small in-8 (small marginal tears). Song of victory after the Battle of the Marne. "The first part of the Revenge campaign has come to an end. - the first part of the Revenge campaign. The enemy, more insolent than ever about his early successes, saw his will broken and ours imposed on him; he was forced to flee before our troops. Our dead of Montmirail, La Fère Champenoise and Craonne must have shuddered in their graves, like Heine's grenadier, to hear the victorious march of our soldiers and the terrible roll of our cannons. France has regained her self-awareness: she had lost it since her disasters, and for those especially who, like you, had witnessed it, what immense, unspeakable joy! Moments like these extinguish the egoism of individuals in a people, ignite the spirit of sacrifice, and make courage gush forth in torrents, making everyone feel that no one is worth anything apart from the fatherland. And yet, in a supreme and unexpected glory, France celebrated its triumph in silence, tightening its self-imposed discipline even further, like a noisy, mobile troop to whom a leader commands "Attention!". And yet, it is clear that the enemy had many military advantages over us: moreover, they served him well at the beginning. Strategically, he had the initiative in terms of armaments and, in particular, mobilisation. Above all, he had the decision taken in advance to violate Belgian neutrality with almost all his forces, a decision that we could not have taken without his; a decision that had to be foreseen, but that could also be considered as a feint. This certainly weighed heavily on the initial distribution of our forces, which was certainly unfavourable. Finally, there was the serious fault of the British government, which did not decide to go to war until the very last moment, and was very ill-prepared in terms of its army. The English troops were considerably behind what had been planned and promised, and they were late precisely at the decisive point on our extreme left. I am not talking about their very modest numbers (70,000 men at most) compared to what public opinion had hoped for. From a tactical point of view, the Germans found themselves served at the beginning by the excess of our qualities. On all our battlefields from the start, the infantry attacked furiously and, moreover, thoughtlessly. On the other hand, the command of corps and especially divisions and brigades, too often old, without much initiative or sufficient decision, was unable to give the artillery and engineers the orders they needed to support them at the right moment. This resulted in terrible and immediate losses at almost every point, causing a very small number of lapses, but above all stopping our momentum. Once the cruel experience had been made, our army was sufficiently educated to take advantage of it immediately. The Generalissimo [Joffre] immediately limited the costs by not insisting on the decisive battle on the Meuse. He chose new ground, escaped the enemy's embrace smoothly and completely changed the faulty disposition of his forces. On the other hand, on the Marne, in the opinion of all the wounded who came to us, the fighting was much better coordinated, the offensive more reasoned, the link-up of weapons better. Victory was immediately ours. The enemy will not be able to stop our pursuit before the Meuse and Luxembourg at the earliest, and we will have all the glory of having, without the Russians having been indispensable to us, defeated in the great and decisive battle the army that considered itself to be the first in the world"... LNC, I, p. 90.