In the instant it was discovered that the enemy was more numerous than they had dreamed.

He was actually more numerous even than they discovered.

Every oncoming horseman doubled as in a drunkard's vision; and they were soon striving without speech in a nightmare of numbers.

Then all the allied forces at the front were overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons; and began that black retreat, in which so many of our young men knew war first and at its worst in this terrible world; and so many never returned.
In that blackness began to grow strange emotions, long unfamiliar to our blood.

Those six dark days are as full of legends as the six centuries of the Dark Ages.