It is not unity; it is not, in the moral sense, discipline.  Nothing can be more united in a moral sense than a French, British, or 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, so much on top of his prey that it could not even give way to him; but had to hit such blows as it could in the hope of checking him for the instant needed for escape.  Sometimes the oncoming wave was so close that a small individual accident, the capture of one man, would mean the washing out of a whole battalion.  For day after day this living death endured.  And day after day a certain dark truth began to be revealed, bit by bit, certainly to the incredulous wonder of the Prussians, quite possibly to the surprise of the French, and quite as possibly to the surprise of themselves; that there was something singular about the British soldiers.  That singular thing may be expressed in a variety of ways; but it would be almost certainly expressed insufficiently by anyone who had not had the moral courage to face the facts about his country in the last decades before the war.  It may perhaps be best expressed by saying that some thousands of Englishmen were dead:  and that England was not.