and their suburbs and their factories and their rookeries, and asked for
the arms of men. In a throng that was at last three million men, the
islanders went forth from their island, as simply as the mountaineers
had gone forth from their mountain, with their faces to the dawn.



X--_The Battle of the Marne_


The impression produced by the first week of war was that the British
contingent had come just in time for the end of the world. Or rather,
for any sensitive and civilised man, touched by the modern doubt but by
the equally modern mysticism, that old theocratic vision fell far short
of the sickening terror of the time. For it was a day of judgment in
which upon the throne in heaven and above the cherubim, sat not God, but
another.

The British had been posted at the extreme western end of the allied
line in the north. The other end rested on the secure city and fortress
of Namur; their end rested upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental
fancy to say that there was something forlorn in the position of that
loose end in a strange land, with only the sad fields of Northern France
between them and the sea. For it was really round that loose end that
the foe would probably fling the lasso of his charge; it was here that
death might soon be present upon every side. It must be remembered that
many critics, including many Englishmen, doubted whether a rust had not
eaten into this as into other parts of the national life, feared that
England had too long neglected both the ethic and the technique of war,
and would prove a weak link in the chain. The enemy was absolutely