Then she forced into the ranks those that could but would not go as long as they got others to do their fighting for them. In the meantime her whole population, except those slackers every country had, had put its strenuous hand to war work of one kind or another. So, whether by sea or land or air, whether as warriors or as civilians, the people of Great Britain gave their united all to the noblest cause on earth. And, when the war ended, Great Britain had the biggest army as well as the biggest navy in the world--biggest not only in absolute numbers but also biggest in proportion to the whole number of men fit to bear arms. Nor was this in any way due to her having lost less than others; for she had the greatest total loss in killed and wounded of all the Allies--greatest on land, greatest by sea, and greatest in the air. Besides all we have seen before, in following the more purely naval fortunes of the war, the Navy did priceless work in October 1914, when the huge German armies, beaten by the heroic French at the immortal Battle of the Marne, tried to take the North-East coast of France with the ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne. Held by Joffre further south, they found more than their match in the north, when French's little British army fought them to a standstill, while the Navy simply burnt them away from the coast by a perfect hurricane of fire. Better still was the way the Navy finished off the submarine blockade. Of the 203 enemy submarines destroyed 151 were finished by the British Navy. The French, Americans, and Italians killed off the rest. All the 150 submarines surrendered came slinking into Harwich, the great British base for submarines. All the 170 submarines the Germans were building when the war was stopped were given up to the Allied Naval Commission headed by a British admiral and backed by a British fleet.