And then a strange thing happened.  England, that had not in the modern sense any army at all, was justified of all her children.  Respected institutions and reputations did indeed waver and collapse on many sides:  though the chief of the states replied worthily to a bribe from the foreign bully, many other politicians were sufficiently wild and weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention.  One was set to restrain the journalists, and had to be restrained himself, for being more sensational than any of them.  Another scolded the working-classes in the style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer.  But England was saved by a forgotten thing—­the English.  Simple men with simple motives, the chief one a hate of injustice which grows simpler the longer we stare at it, came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields 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 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.