de were not
satisfactorily disposed for staying the hostile rush, that the French
were unable to hold their ground, and that our little army were sore
beset and in full retreat before superior hosts. King's Messengers,
the Duke of Marlborough and Major Hankey, came to see me, and told me
of the atmosphere of grave anxiety prevalent at G.H.Q. A message from
General Henry Wilson, written in pencil late at night on a leaf of a
notebook, reached me, of so ominous a character (seeing that he
assuredly was not one to quail) that I never showed it to anybody--not
even to my chief, Sir C. Douglas. And yet, one felt somehow that we
should pull through in spite of all, and even though the demands
coming to hand for maps of regions in the very heart of France
certainly conveyed no encouragement. One regretted that the country
was being kept so much in the dark--the best is never got out of the
Anglo-Saxon race until it is in a tight place. A special edition of
the _Times_, issued on Sunday morning the 30th of August, which
contained a somewhat lurid account of the retreat by some hysterical
journalist, and which, it turned out, had been doctored by the head of
the Press Bureau, caused great anger in some quarters. But for my
part I rather welcomed it. Anything that would help to bring home to
the public what they were up against was to the good. Whoever first
made use of that pestilent phrase "business as usual," whether it was
a Cabinet Minister, or a Fleet Street scribe, or some gag-merchant on
the music-hall stage, had much to answer for.

The Topographical Section under Colonel Hedley did fine work during
those troubled days before the Battle of the Marne. It was in the
highest degree gratifying to find a branch, for which one found
oneself suddenly after a fashion responsible, to be capable of so
promptly and effectually meeting emergencies. The Expeditionary Force
had taken with it generous supplies of maps portraying the regions
adjacent to the Franco-Belgian frontier, where it proposed to operate;
a somewhat hasty retreat to a point right away back, south-east of
Paris, had formed no part of its programme. A day or two after the
first clash of arms near Mons, a wire arrived demanding the instant
despatch of maps of the country as far to the rear as the Seine and
the Marne. Now, as all units had to be supplied on a liberal scale,
this meant hundreds of copies of each of a considerable number of
different large-scale sheets