Meanwhile the marching armies tramped on, fifteen and twenty miles a day in the heat of a brilliant late summer. "Soon we were crossing the last ridge that separated us from the Marne valley," recorded Bloem. "It was another grilling, exhausting day. Twenty-five miles up hill and down dale under a blazing sun. To our left we could hear the guns of Bülow's army with which we seemed nearly in touch again." There were flashes of action, engagements between advance and rear guards, short, bitter little battles, such as that at Néry on 1 September, where the British 1st Cavalry Brigade and L Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, held up the progress of the German 4th Cavalry Division for a morning. L Battery's gunners won three Victoria Crosses in their unequal contest with the enemy, which ended, a German historian recorded, "decidedly to the disadvantages of the German cavalry." There was a great deal of bridge-blowing and re-bridging, as the armies negotiated the many-branched river system of the Paris basin, of contested delays at obstacles, of artillery exchanges, of brief outbursts of rifle fire, as scouts ran into outposts or the tail of a retreating column was overtaken by pursuers. For the vast majority on both sides, however, the last week of August and the first of September was an ordeal of day-long marches, begun before the sun rose, ended in the twilight. A trooper of the 4th Dragoon Guards, Ben Clouting, recorded that his regiment was roused at 4:30 on the morning of 1 September, 2 on the morning of the 2nd, 4:20 a.m. on the 3rd and 5th and 5 a.m. on the 6th. He remembered that the horses, beside which they often walked to spare their backs, "soon began to drop their heads and wouldn't shake themselves like they normally did...they fell asleep standing up, their legs buckling. As they stumbled forward...they lost their balance completely, falling forward and taking the skin off their knees." For the men, "the greatest strain...worse than any physical discomfort or even hunger was...fatigue. Pain could be endured, food scrounged, but the desire for rest was never-ending...I fell off my horse more than once, and watched others do the same, slowly slumping forward, grabbing for their horse's neck, in a dazed, barely conscious way. At any halt men fell asleep instantaneously."
The infantry, who got no chance to ride, dropped behind the column of route in scores and these stragglers, "in grim determination...hobbled along in ones or twos...as [they] sought desperately to stay in touch with their regiments...Food came up from Army Service Corps ration dumps, which were just boxes of biscuits [and] tins of bully beef...Very occasionally, a chalk notice marked the food up for a particular regiment, but more often than not we just helped ourselves, stuffing what we could into every pocket." Jofffe, out on inspection of the French armies on 30 August, passed "retreating columns...Red trousers had faded to the colour of pale brick, coats were ragged and torn, shoes caked with mud, eyes cavernous in faces dulled by exhaustion and dark with many days' growth of beard. Twenty days of campaigning seemed to have aged the soldiers as many years." The French and British, long though their daily marches, were at least falling back on their lines of supply. The Germans marched ahead of theirs and often went without food, though, like the British, their need was for rest rather than rations. A French witness noticed on 3 September, when a unit of the invaders reached their billets for the night, "they fell down exhausted, muttering in a dazed way, 'forty kilometres! forty kilometres!' That was all they could say."
~ From The First World War by John Keegan, p. 107