field. The embarkation began on 7 August, less than three days after
war had been declared, and the Government showed a sound confidence in
our little-understood command of the sea when it risked the whole of
our effective fighting force by sending it across the Channel to
assist the French and thus abandoning the defence of British shores to
the British Navy. By the 16th the transportation had been accomplished
without a hitch or loss of any kind. It was an achievement which even
domestic faction failed to belittle until time itself had effaced it
from popular recollection.

From Boulogne and from other ports the troops were sent up to the
wavering line of battle along the Franco-Belgian frontier. They came
not to win a victory but to save an army from disaster. The mass of
French reserves were in Lorraine or far away to the south, and the
safety of the French line on the northern front had depended upon the
assumed impregnability of Namur and an equally fallacious
underestimate of the number of German troops in Belgium. Three French
armies, the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth, were strung along the
frontier from Montmédy across the Meuse and the Sambre to a point
north-west of Charleroi, where the British took up their position
stretching through Binche, Mons, and along the canal from Mons to
Condé. Far away to the south-west was a French Territorial corps in
front of Arras, and at Maubeuge behind the British centre was a French
cavalry corps under General Sordet. The French staff anticipated a
defeat of the German attack on these lines and then a successful
offensive, and military critics in England even wrote of the hopeless
position of the Germans under Von Buelow and Von Kluck thrust far
forward into a cul-de-sac in Belgium with the French on their left at
Charleroi, the British on their right front at Mons, and the Belgians
on their right rear before Antwerp. The German calculation was that