kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until
they fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the
excitable Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralized
in face of German organization, merely talks with his hands. In a
great crisis he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their
democracy and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war
to France and Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans.
For it is just possible that God is not in the fight. We don't know
that He even approved of the war.

V
And Calais Waits

To the traveller, Calais had been the symbol of the shortest route
from London to Paris, the shortest spell of torment in crossing the
British Channel. It was a point where one felt infinite relief or sad
physical anticipations. In the last days of November Calais became
the symbol of a struggle for world-power. The British and the French
were fighting to hold Calais; the Germans to get it. In Calais,
Germany would have her foot on the Atlantic coast. She could look
across only twenty-two miles of water to the chalk cliffs of Dover. She
would be as near her rival as twice the length of Manhattan Island;
within the range of a modern gun; within an hour by steamer and
twenty minutes by aeroplane.

The long battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea had been
established. There was no getting around the Allied flank; there had
ceased to be a flank. To win Calais, Germany must crush through by
main force, without any manoeuvre. From the cafes where the British
journalists gathered England received its news, which they gleaned
from refugees and stragglers and passing officers. They wrote
something every day, for England must have something about that
dizzy, head-on wrestle in the mud, that writhing line of changing
positions of new trenches rising behind the old destroyed by German
artillery. The British were fighting with their last reserves on the Ypres-
Armentieres line. The French divisions to the north were suffering no
less heavily, and beyond them the Belgians were trying to hold the
last strip of their land which remained under Belgian sovereignty.
Cordons of guards which kept back the observer from the struggle
could not keep back the truth. Something ominous was in the air.

It was worth while being in that old town as it waited on the issue in
the late October rains. Its fishermen crept out in the mornings from
the shelter of its quays, where