Second before first?

Another (school) student once wrote in an exam when analysing a short story: “The first dam followed the second”. Now here was another puzzle for me. Why should the first dam follow the second, i.e. come after the second? That did not seem to make sense. Then I realised that the student was translating from German: “Dem ersten Damm folgte der zweite”. Here, the second is the one that follows, because it is the subject of the sentence, although it appears at the end. That’s fine in German, but if you do it in English, you get it all wrong.