n a nursery laboriously hacked to
pieces. Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of
the name of the Spirit that had passed.

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