In The Firing Line

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Adcock Arthur St. John. In The Firing Line

I. The Baptism of Fire

II. The Four Days’ Battle Near Mons

III. The Destruction of Louvain

IV. The Fight in the North Sea

V. From Mons to the Walls of Paris

VI. The Spirit of Victory

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Most of us are old enough to remember how, when we entered upon the South African Campaign (as when we started the Crimean and other of our wars) the nation was divided against itself; passionate, bitter controversies were waged between anti-Boer and pro-Boer – between those who considered the war an unjust and those who considered it a just one. This time there has been nothing of that. Sir Edward Grey’s resolute efforts for peace proving futile, as soon as Germany tore up her obligations of honour, that “scrap of paper,” and began to pour her huge, boastedly irresistible armies into Belgium, we took up the gauge she so insolently flung to us, and the one feeling from end to end of the Empire was of devout thankfulness that our Government had so instantly done the only right and honourable thing; all political parties, all classes flung their differences behind them unhesitatingly and stood four-square at once against the common enemy. They were heartened by a sense of relief, even, that the swaggering German peril which had been darkly menacing us for years had materialised and was upon us at last, that we were coming to grips with it and should have the chance of ending it once and for ever.

But immediately after our declaration of war on August 4th, a strange secrecy and silence fell like an impenetrable mask over all our military movements. In our cities and towns we were troubled with business disorganisations, but that mystery, that waiting in suspense, troubled us far more. News came that the fighting continued furiously on the Belgian frontier; that it was beginning on the fringes of Alsace; that the Russians were advancing victoriously on East Prussia; and still though our own army was mobilised and we were eagerly starting to raise a new and a larger one, we rightly learned no more, perhaps less, than the enemy could of what our Expeditionary Force was doing or where it was. Last time we were at war we had seen regiment after regiment go off with bands playing and with cheering multitudes lining the roads as they passed; this time we had no glimpse of their going; did not know when they went, or so much as whether they were gone. One day rumour landed them safely in France or Belgium; the next it assured us that they were not yet ready to embark; and the next it had rushed them, as by magic, right across Belgium and credited them with standing shoulder to shoulder in the fighting line with the magnificent defenders of Liège. But the glory of that defence, as we were soon to find out, belongs to Belgium alone; the Germans had hacked their way through and were nearing Mons before our men were able to get far enough north to come in touch with them. Not that they had lost any time on the road. It took a fortnight to mobilise and equip them; they sailed from Southampton on August 17th, and four days later were at Mons and under fire. This much and more you may gather from a diary-letter that was published in the Western Daily Press:

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They think they can beat any army in the world simply by hurling great masses of troops against them, but they are finding out their mistake now that they are put up against British troops. The reason for the British retreat is this – all up through France are great lines of entrenchments and fortresses, and as they have not enough men to defeat the Germans in open battle, they are simply retiring from position to position – holding the Germans for a few days and then retiring to the next one. All this is just to gain time. Our losses are pretty severe, but they are nothing to the Germans, whose losses are ten to every one of ours.

You mustn’t run away with the notion that we stand shivering or cowering under shell fire, for we don’t. We just go about our business in the usual way. If it’s potting at the Germans that is to the fore we keep at it as though nothing were happening, and if we’re just having a wee bit chat among ourselves we keep at it all the same.

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