r saw
a man look more exhausted than General von Fuechter, who, according to
report, had not had an hour's sleep during the week. But though the
General's cheeks were sunken, his chin unshaven, and his eyes blood-red,
his demeanour was that of an iron man--stern, brusque, taciturn, erect,
and singularly immobile.

Food was served to this man of blood and iron in the Mansion House,
while the Lord Mayor's secretary proceeded to Whitehall, with word to
the effect that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England
awaited the sword and formal surrender of the British Commander, before
proceeding to take up quarters in which he would deal with peace
negotiations.

Forster's great work, "The Surrender," gives the finest description we
have of the scene that followed. The Field Marshal in command of the
British forces had that morning been sent for by a Cabinet Council then
being held in the Prime Minister's room at the House of Commons. With
nine members of his staff, the white-haired Field Marshal rode slowly
into the City, in full uniform. His instructions were for unconditional
surrender, and a request for the immediate consideration of the details
of peace negotiations.

The Field Marshal had once been the most popular idol of the British
people, whom he had served nobly in a hundred fights. Of late years he
himself had been as completely disregarded, as the grave warnings, the
earnest appeals, which he had bravely continued to urge upon a
neglectful people. The very Government which now despatched him upon the
hardest task of his whole career, the tendering of his sword to his
country's enemy, had for long treated him with cold disfavour. The
general public, in its anti-national madness, had sneered at this great
little man, their one-time hero, as a Jingo crank.

(As an instance of the lengths to which the public madness went in this
matter, the curious will find in the British Museum copies of at least
one farcical work of fiction written and published with considerable
success, as burlesques of that very invasion which had now occurred, of
the possibility of which this loyal servant in particular had so
earnestly and so unavailingly warned his countrymen.)

Now, the blow he had so often foreshadowed had fallen; the capital of
the British Empire was actually in possession of an enemy; and the
British leader knew himself for a Commander without an Army.

He had long since given his only son to the cause