In a throng that was at last three million men, the islanders went forth from their island, as simply as the mountaineers had gone forth from their mountain, with their faces to the dawn.
X--_The Battle of the Marne_ The impression produced by the first week of war was that the British contingent had come just in time for the end of the world.

Or rather, for any sensitive and civilised man, touched by the modern doubt but by the equally modern mysticism, that old theocratic vision fell far short of the sickening terror of the time.

For it was a day of judgment in which upon the throne in heaven and above the cherubim, sat not God, but another.
The British had been posted at the extreme western end of the allied line in the north.

The other end rested on the secure city and fortress of Namur; their end rested upon nothing.

It is not wholly a sentimental fancy to say that there was something forlorn in the position of that loose end in a strange land, with only the sad fields of Northern France between them and the sea.