While Britain at large still hugged the delusion of easy victory, in grotesque underestimation of the enemy’s power, and while Kitchener’s recruit-finding machinery was being put in vigorous motion, the War Office, in co-operation with the navy, was accomplishing as magnificent a piece of military work as army annals hold--the silent landing of the British Expeditionary Force of one hundred and sixty thousand men, with its full complement of horses, guns and stores, on the shores of France. That feat will live as immortal disproof of the charge popular in the United States that "hustle" is a word which is conspicuously missing from the British lexicon. Compared to it, our "hustle" in landing an army in Cuba in 1898 was the quintessence of procrastination and muddle. The British railways had been taken over by the Government coincident with the arrival of war, an "Executive Committee" consisting of the General Managers of the main companies having been established more than a year previous as an advisory council for such an emergency as had now supervened. Embarkation of the Expeditionary Force commenced on the night of August 7th. Admiral Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, assured Lord Kitchener that the channel passage was as safe as the Thames itself. The British public, receiving its first lesson in relentless censorship of war news, was kept so effectually in the dark as to the dispatch of the largest army which ever left English shores that it knew nothing whatever of it till the host was at its destination, with breasts bared to the foe. The landing of Sir John French’s legions on the soil of France was accomplished, complete in every detail, by August 17th.