On 17 September he instructed his armies to “keep the enemy under threat of attack and thus prevent him from disengaging and transferring portions of his forces from one point to another.”117 Three days earlier, Falkenhayn, the new German Chief of Staff, had likewise ordered counter-attacks along the whole front with a similar object. Both commanders had grasped that opportunity in the campaign in the west now lay north of the active battlefront, in the hundred-mile sweep of territory standing, denuded of troops, between the Aisne and the sea. Whoever could find an army to operate there,
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