to Alsace was magnified
into a great military feat; the British fleet had squelched the German
navy by sinking nineteen battleships; the Kaiser, haggard and
blear-eyed, was alternately degrading and shooting Generals and issuing
flamboyant proclamations. Finally, Russia was flattening out East
Prussia and Galicia with the slow crunching of a steam roller.

Out of this maelstroem of "news" a level-headed soldier might, and did,
extract certain hard facts. The landing of Sir John French's force took
place exactly at the time and place and in the numbers Dalroy himself
had estimated. To throw a small army into Flanders would have been
folly. Obviously, the British must join hands with the French before
offering battle. For the rest--though he went out very little, and
alone, as being less risky--he recognised the hour when the German
machine recovered its momentum after the first unexpected collapse. He
saw order replace chaos. He watched the dragon crawling ever onward, and
understood then that no act of man could save Belgium. Verviers was the
best possible site for an observer who knew how to use his eyes. He
assumed that what was occurring there was going on with equal precision
in Luxembourg and along the line of the Vosges Mountains.

Gradually, too, he reconciled his conscience to these days of waiting.
He believed now that his services would be immensely more useful to the
British commander-in-chief in the field if he could cross the French
frontier rather than reach London and the War Office by way of the
Belgian coast. This decision lightened his heart. He was beginning to
fear that the welfare of Irene Beresford was conflicting with duty. It
was cheering to feel convinced that the odds and ends of information
picked up in Verviers might prove of inestimable value to the allied
cause. For instance, Liege was being laid low by eleven-inch howitzers,
but he had seen seventeen-inch howitzers, each in three parts, each part
drawn by forty horses or a dozen traction-engines, moving slowly toward
the south-west. There lay Namur and France. No need to doubt now where
the chief theatre of the war would find its habitat. The German staff
had blundered in its initial strategy, but the defect was being
repaired. All that had gone before was a mere prelude to the grim
business which would be transacted beyond the Meuse.

During that period of quiescence, certain minor and personal elements
affecting the future passed from