ways a time of exhausting suspense. At what moment our first
Expeditionary Force had left England no one quite knew, but after we
learned that it had landed in France we waited with anxious hearts and
listened with strained ears.

We heard the tramp of the gigantic German army, pouring through the
streets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, its
smoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, its
cuirassiers in burnished helmets that were shining in the autumn sun.
The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible multitude! Regiment
after regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours,
and even days--the mighty legions of the nation that a few days before
had "never so much as dreamt" of war!

At last we had news of our men. Against overwhelming odds they had
fought like heroes--why shouldn't they, since they were Englishmen?--but
had been compelled to fall back at length, and were now retreating
rapidly, some reports said flying in confusion, broken and done. What?
Was it possible? Our army thrown back in disorder? Our first army, too,
the flower of the fighting men of the world? It was too monstrous, too
awful!

The news was cruelly, and even wickedly, exaggerated, but nevertheless
it did us good. He knows the British character very imperfectly who does
not see that the qualities in which it is unsurpassed among the races
of mankind are those with which it meets adversity and confronts the
darkest night. Within a few days of the report that our soldiers were
falling back from Mons, the old cry "Your King and country need you"
went through the land with a new thrill, and hundreds of thousands of
free men leapt to the relief of the flag.

There has been nothing like it in the history of any nation. And it is
hard to say which is the more moving manifestation of that moment in the
great drama of the war--the spontaneous response of the poor who sprang
forward to defend their country, though they had no more material
property in it than the right to as much of its soil as would make their
graves, or the splendid reply of the rich whose lands were an agelong
possession, and often the foundation of their titles and honours.

"BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND... ENGLAND."

What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or the
upper-middle classes had come to believe that too many of the young men
of our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasure