"With few personal ideas of his own, Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called “a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine.” Lanrezac’s sin was in having been right, all too vocally. He had been right from the beginning about the fatal underestimation of the German right wing as a result of which a fair part of France was now under the German boot. His decision to break off battle at Charleroi when threatened with double envelopment by Bülow’s and Hausen’s armies had saved the French left wing."
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Original Language: English
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Chapter 22, “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne” (p. 495)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_August
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The Guns of August
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