ings.... 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 jo