sion without beginning and without end--and of the procession
being halted for his benefit, and of a German officer therein who struck
a soldier several times in the face angrily with his cane, while the man
stood stiffly at attention. George had an ardent desire to spend a few
minutes alone with that officer; he could not get the soldier's bruised
cheek out of his memory.

Again, he was moved and even dismayed by the recitals of the entry of
the German army into Brussels and of its breaking into the goose-step as
it reached the Grande Place, though he regarded the goose-step as too
ridiculous and contemptible for words. Then the French defence of
Dinant, and the Belgian defence of Liege, failure as it was, and the
obstinate resistance at Namur, inspired him; and the engagements between
Belgians and Uhlans, in which the clumsy Uhlans were always scattered,
destroyed for him the dread significance of the term 'Uhlan.'

He simply did not comprehend that all these events were negligible
trifles, that no American correspondent had seen the hundredth part of
the enemy forces, that the troops which marched through Brussels were a
tiny, theatrical side-show, a circus, that the attack on Liege had been
mismanaged, that the great battle at Dinant was a mere skirmish in the
new scale of war, and the engagements with Uhlans mere scuffles, and
that behind the screen of these infinitesimal phenomena _the German
army_, unimagined in its hugeness, horror, and might, was creeping like
a fatal and monstrous caterpillar surely towards France.

A similar screen hid from him the realities of England. He saw bunting
and recruits, and the crowds outside consulates. But he had no idea of
the ceaseless flight of innumerable crammed trains day and night
southwards, of the gathering together of Atlantic liners and excursion
steamers from all the coasts into an unprecedented Armada, of the
sighting of the vanguard of that Armada by an incredulous Boulogne, of
the landing of British regiments and guns and aeroplanes in the midst of
a Boulogne wonderstruck and delirious, and of the thrill which thereupon
ecstatically shivered through France. He knew only that 'the
Expeditionary Force had landed in safety.'

He could not believe that a British Army could face successfully the
legendary Prussians with their Great General Staff, and yet he had a
mystic and entirely illogical belief in the invincibility of the British
Army. He had read somewhere tha