certain that it was so. To these men, standing disconsolately amid the
hedgeless plains and poplars, came the news that Namur was gone, which
was to their captains one of the four corners of the earth. The two
armies had touched; and instantly the weaker took an electric shock
which told of electric energy, deep into deep Germany, battery behind
battery of abysmal force. In the instant it was discovered that the
enemy was more numerous than they had dreamed. He was actually more
numerous even than they discovered. Every oncoming horseman doubled as
in a drunkard's vision; and they were soon striving without speech in a
nightmare of numbers. Then all the allied forces at the front were
overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons; and began that black retreat,
in which so many of our young men knew war first and at its worst in
this terrible world; and so many never returned.

In that blackness began to grow strange emotions, long unfamiliar to our
blood. Those six dark days are as full of legends as the six centuries
of the Dark Ages. Many of these may be exaggerated fancies, one was
certainly an avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more
difficult to dissipate into the daylight. But one curious fact remains
about them if they were all lies, or even if they were all deliberate
works of art. Not one of them referred to those close, crowded, and
stirring three centuries which are nearest to us, and which alone are
covered in this sketch, the centuries during which the Teutonic
influence had expanded itself over our islands. Ghosts were there
perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors. Nobody saw
Cromwell or even Wellington; nobody so much as thought about Cecil
Rhodes. Things were either seen or said among the British which linked
them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, with the French, who spoke
of Joan of Arc in heaven above the fated city; or the Russians who
dreamed of the Mother of God with her hand pointing to the west. They