Russian regiment. Nothing, for that matter, could be more united than a
Highland clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of religious fanatics in the
Soudan. What such engines, in such size and multiplicity, really meant
was this: they meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and
more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming
larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities
growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities;
they meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed
repetition and dehumanised division of labour, to which no man born
would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat
his ploughshare into a sword. The nations of the earth were not to
surrender to the Kaiser; they were to surrender to Krupp, his master and
theirs; the French, the British, the Russians were to surrender to Krupp
as the Germans themselves, after a few swiftly broken strikes, had
already surrendered to Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that
incomparable machinery, through every link in that iron and unending
chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a certain kind of artist; an
artist whose hands are never idle through dreaming or drawn back in
disgust or lifted in wonder or in wrath; but sure and tireless in their
touch upon the thousand little things that make the invisible machinery
of life. That artist was there in triumph; but he had no name. The
ancient world called him the Slave.

From this advancing machine of millions, the slighter array of the
Allies, and especially the British at their ultimate outpost, saved
themselves by a succession of hair's-breadth escapes and what must have
seemed to the soldiers the heartrending luck of a mouse before a cat.
Again and again Von Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and
infantry, clawed round the end of the British force, which eluded it as
by leaping back again and again. Sometimes the pursuer was, so to speak,