hat was to follow.

It was not till the early afternoon of the Sunday that contact was
first taken seriously between Sir John French and von Kluck. At that
moment the British commander believed, both from a general and
erroneous judgment which the French command had tendered him and from
his own air work, that he had in front of him one and a half or at the
most two army corps; and though the force, as we shall see in a
moment, was far larger, its magnitude did not appear as the afternoon
wore on. Full contact was established perhaps between three and four,
by which hour the pressure was beginning to be severely felt, and upon
the extreme right of the line it had already been necessary to take up
defensive positions a little behind those established in the morning.
But by five o'clock, with more than two good hours of daylight before
it, the British command, though perhaps already doubtful whether the
advancing masses of the enemy did not stand for more men, and
especially for more guns than had been expected, was well holding its
own, when all its dispositions were abruptly changed by an unexpected
piece of news.

It was at this moment in the afternoon--that is, about five
o'clock--that the French General Staff communicated to Sir John French
information bearing two widely different characteristics: the first
that it came late; the second that had it not come when it did, the
whole army, French as well as British, would have been turned.

The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that
Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the
bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day,
Saturday. Consequent upon this, the enemy had been able to effect the
passage of the Sambre, not only in Namur itself, but in its immediate
neighbourhood, and, such passages once secured, it was but a question
of time for the whole line to fall into the enemy's hands. When
superior numbers have passed one end of an obstacle it is obvious that
the rest of the obstacle gradually becomes useless.[3] At what hour
the French knew that they had to retire, we have not been told. As we
have seen, the enemy was right within Namur on the early afternoon of
Saturday, the 22nd, and it is to be presumed that the French
retirement was in full swing by the Sunday morning, in which case the
British contingent, which this retirement left in peril upon the
western extreme of the line, ought to have be