h their portentous activities. One school of psychologists inclined
to minimise this participation, but the balance of evidence goes to
show that there were massive responses to these suggestions of the
belligerent schemer. Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal;
innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and
the weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of
loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements of the
international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the common man were
picked up haphazard, there was practically nothing in such education as
he was given that was ever intended to fit him for citizenship as such
(that conception only appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern
State ideas), and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill
his vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and
national aggression.

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic when
presently his battalion came up from the depot to London, to entrain for
the French frontier. He tells of children and women and lads and old men
cheering and shouting, of the streets and rows hung with the flags of
the Allied Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among the destitute and
unemployed. The Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into
enrolment offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement.
At every convenient place upon the line on either side of the Channel
Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feeling in the
regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim anticipations, was
none the less warlike.

But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without established
ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was with himself,
a natural response to collective movement, and to martial sounds and
colours, and the exhilarating challenge of vague dangers. And people had
been so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation for war that its
arrival came with an effect of positive relief.

Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower
Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the
various British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they were
intended to entrench themselves.

Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during
the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been
confuse