The British Army had a small share in that victory of the Marne. Its weight did not count for much, but its artillery harassed the German retreat with deadly execution, and in fighting down from Mons it had helped to spoil the German time-table and to bar the way to Paris for just that little time which enabled France to stand on its line of battle and repair the dreadful blunders of its first defence. Have the French forgotten that? It happened ten years ago! TRENCH WARFARE The Germans were forced to dig in. It was the beginning of trench warfare. Then the line hardly altered for four years more, in spite of endless battles and unceasing death. The British Regulars—that “contemptible little army” as the Kaiser called it before its rifle fire mowed down his men—were spent and done after the first and second Battles of Ypres, where they barred the way to Calais with a thin line standing among their dead. The Territorials—volunteers before the war—arrived, as steady as old soldiers. It was due to them that the Regulars had been able to get to France, leaving them for home defence. Then the new armies came into the field—“the Kitchener boys”—the First Hundred Thousand. They were those young men who had stormed the recruiting offices at the first call: from the Universities, public schools, city offices, village shops, and fields. They had been together in the ranks, learning each other’s language, bullied by sergeant-majors, broken in by discipline, taught to forget the decencies of civilisation as they had known it in their homes, the little comforts of their former state, individual liberty. Already they had left their old civilian life far behind. Yet they came out to France and Flanders like schoolboys in keenness and enthusiasm. They wanted to get into the “real thing” after all that gruelling training. They got into it quickly enough, up beyond Ypres at Hooge and St. Julien, or further south at “Plug Street” and Hill 60. They sat in water-logged trenches, with bits of dead bodies in the mud about them, under frightful shell-fire twenty times greater than the answer of their own guns because they were weak in artillery and short of shells. (The workers at home had not got into their stride in pouring out the engines of destruction.) They had no dug-outs worth the name. Only the Germans knew how to build them then, as they knew most else of war, as masters of technique, overwhelmingly superior in material, and in organisation. The British were in the low ground everywhere, with the Germans on the high ground, so that they could not march or move by daylight, or light a fire, or cross a road, without being signalled to watchful eyes and shelled without mercy. They were lousy in every seam of their shirts. There was no chance of cleanliness unless they were far behind the lines. Young gentlemen of England—and of Scotland, Ireland and Wales—found themselves like cave men: eating,