Yet Clemenceau showed little loss of vigour compared with his former self. No Englishman has ever undergone what he underwent at that period. Undoubtedly, when the news came to us of the great retreat of August, 1914, our heartfelt sympathy went out to our own men. We were all likewise full of admiration for our French comrades who still held the Franco-British line unbroken. But at least our hearths and homes were kept in safety for us--the raids of aircraft excepted--by the magnificent courage of our sailors in the North Sea and of our soldiers who freely gave their lives to protect us from the enemy. If we would fully appreciate what was happening to France and Belgium, in spite of all their efforts, we must imagine the county of Durham completely occupied by the German hordes, Yorkshire overrun and the chance of saving London from the enemy dependent upon the result of a battle to be fought in the neighbourhood of Cambridge. It would be well if we could display at such a crisis in England the same cool courage that the Parisians did; if we had generals at our disposal such as Joffre and Foch and Gallieni; and statesmen in reserve such as Clemenceau. That was how things looked prior to the first battle of the Marne, which checked the early flood of German invasion and removed for the time being the necessity for retiring from Amiens and Epernay and moving the seat of government from Paris. During the whole of this trying period Clemenceau never lost heart for a moment, nor his head either; and day after day in his journal he surveyed the whole situation without fear, devoid of illusion, yet confident always that France and her Allies could not be beaten to their knees. When things looked worst and Paris was being drained of her population by order, in preparation for a siege, and when the Government was about to be removed to Bordeaux, this is how Clemenceau wrote, recalling the past to cheer his countrymen in the present: "The seat of government at Bordeaux is a new phase of the war which must follow its course: a renewal of the war in the Provinces, as in the days of the Gambettas, of the Freycinets. The same struggle against the same German invasion, with the capital of France reduced to the simple condition of a fortress, with France herself--provincial France, as we say--taking in hand her own defence outside the traditional lines of political and administrative concentration in which she has lived.