The French Advance

At dusk, four or five officers gathered around a campfire. For a long while, no one spoke, and the atmosphere was unbearably oppressive.

They were Huthier and the others. One glance at the scene was enough to tell they had suffered a defeat. They had been too busy fleeing for their lives to even set up a temporary command post.

The ever-active Potiorek was the first to break the silence. "Say something, will you? Every one of you looks like you're at a funeral, as if someone or other at home has died.

"So what if we lost a battle? From the beginning, our plan was to fight while retreating. We were merely a little more bedraggled this time."

Among the rebel army, only the few people seated here were truly their own. Everyone else was cannon fodder, and nobody cared whether they lived or died.

Their grief certainly was not over the heavy casualties among the cannon fodder. To put it bluntly, a rabble like the Eighth Division could always be replenished later if they wished.

What truly disheartened them was the defeat—and not just any ordinary defeat.

In order to achieve greater results, the rebel army had made full use of its advantage in striking first and ambushed the French vanguard en route.

Everything had gone smoothly at first. Caught completely off guard, the French had plunged headlong into the encirclement.

However, Huthier and the others had foreseen the beginning but not the end.

Even though the ambush had succeeded, catching the French unprepared, and even though the rebels held an absolute numerical advantage, they still failed to escape defeat.

Defeat was defeat; victory and loss were both perfectly normal on the battlefield. The regrettable part was that the French had chased the routed troops all the way