And again: 

 “And I should say they wound about
  To find the town of Roundabout,
  The merry town of Roundabout
  That makes the world go round.”

If our easy-going ways hampered a hard efficiency, they did at least develop humour and humanity.  Our diplomacy at any rate had not failed us....

He did not believe a word of this stuff.  His deep irrational love for England made him say these things....  For years he had been getting himself into hot water because he had been writing and hinting just such criticisms as Mr. Van der Pant expressed so bluntly....  But he wasn’t going to accept foreign help in dissecting his mother....

And another curious effect that Mr. Van der Pant had upon Mr. Britling was to produce an obstinate confidence about the war and the nearness of the German collapse.  He would promise Mr. Van der Pant that he should be back in Antwerp before May; that the Germans would be over the Rhine by July.  He knew perfectly well that his ignorance of all the military conditions was unqualified, but still he could not restrain himself from this kind of thing so soon as he began to speak Entente Cordiale—­Anglo-French, that is to say.  Something in his relationship to Mr. Van der Pant obliged him to be acutely and absurdly the protecting British....  At times he felt like a conscious bankrupt talking off the hour of disclosure.  But indeed all that Mr. Britling was trying to say against the difficulties of a strange language and an alien temperament, was that the honour of England would never be cleared until Belgium was restored and avenged....

While Mr. Britling was patrolling unimportant roads and entertaining Mr. Van der Pant with discourses upon the nearness of victory and the subtle estimableness of all that was indolent, wasteful and evasive in English life, the war was passing from its first swift phases into a slower, grimmer struggle.  The German retreat ended at the Aisne, and the long outflanking manoeuvres of both hosts towards the Channel began.  The English attempts to assist Belgium in October came too late for the preservation of Antwerp, and after a long and complicated struggle in Flanders the British failed to outflank the German right, lost Ghent, Menin and the Belgian coast, but held Ypres and beat back every attempt of the enemy to reach Dunkirk and Calais.  Meanwhile the smaller German colonies and islands were falling to the navy, the Australian battleship Sydney smashed the Emden at Cocos Island, and the British naval disaster of Coronel was wiped out by the battle of the Falklands.  The Russians were victorious upon their left and took Lemberg, and after some vicissitudes of fortune advanced to Przemysl, occupying the larger part of Galicia; but the disaster of Tannenberg had broken their progress in East Prussia, and the Germans were pressing towards Warsaw.  Turkey had joined the war, and suffered enormous losses in the Caucasus.  The Dardanelles had been shelled for the first time, and the British were at Basra on the Euphrates.