ould presently be
manifest, stemming the onrush; somewhere perhaps in Brabant or East
Flanders. It gave Mr. Britling an unpleasant night to hear at Claverings
that the French were very ill-equipped; had no good modern guns either
at Lille or Maubeuge, were short of boots and equipment generally, and
rather depressed already at the trend of things. Mr. Britling dismissed
this as pessimistic talk, and built his hopes on the still invisible
British army, hovering somewhere--

He would sit over the map of Belgium, choosing where he would prefer to
have the British hover....

Namur fell. The place names continued to shift southward and westward.
The British army or a part of it came to light abruptly at Mons. It had
been fighting for thirty-eight hours and defeating enormously superior
forces of the enemy. That was reassuring until a day or so later "the
Cambray--Le Cateau line" made Mr. Britling realise that the victorious
British had recoiled five and twenty miles....

And then came the Sunday of _The Times_ telegram, which spoke of a
"retreating and a broken army." Mr. Britling did not see this, but Mr.
Manning brought over the report of it in a state of profound
consternation. Things, he said, seemed to be about as bad as they could
be. The English were retreating towards the coast and in much disorder.
They were "in the air" and already separated from the Trench. They had
narrowly escaped "a Sedan" under the fortifications of Maubeuge.... Mr.
Britling was stunned. He went to his study and stared helplessly at
maps. It was as if David had flung his pebble--and missed!

But in the afternoon Mr. Manning telephoned to comfort his friend. A
reassuring despatch from General French had been published and--all was
well--practically--and the British had been splendid. They had been
fighting continuously for several days round and about Mons; they had
been attacked at odds of six to one, and they had repulsed and
inflicted enormous losses on the enemy. They had established an
incontestable personal superiority over the Germans. The Germans had
been mown down in heaps; the British had charged through their cavalry
like charging through paper. So at last and very gloriously for the
British, British and German had met in battle. After the hard fighting
of the 26th about Landrecies, the British had been comparatively
unmolested, reinforcements covering double the losses had joined them
and the German advance was definitely checke