It is November, 1914. Britain is waking, but is far from awake. Nearly everybody and everything are proud to be "as usual." The Fleet has been able to secure but one action with the Germans--Beatty’s smashing blow at the Kaiser’s cruiser squadron in the bight of Heligoland. A great trophy of the engagement is in hand--Admiral von Tirpitz’ son, watch-officer in the Mainz, a prisoner in Wales. For a month and more the war has been raging furiously in the west all the way from the Alps to the North Sea. Antwerp is taken, after a farce-comedy attempt at relief by levies of raw British naval reserves. Joffre is at sanguinary grips with the "Boches" in the Aisne country. The twelve or fifteen miles of British front in the northernmost corner of France and that patch of Flanders not yet in the enemy’s hands is the scene of ceaseless, desperate combat. Jellicoe’s dreadnoughts and destroyers take part at intervals in the grim battle for the channel coast. Ostend has fallen. The German objective farthest west is now clear. The Berlin newspapers head-line the tidings from Flanders "the Road to Calais." Major Moraht in the _Tageblatt_ acknowledges that the campaign for the base from which Napoleon essayed to invade England is "a matter of life or death" for the Germans. Sir John French and the remnant of Belgium’s little army steel themselves for a stone-wall defense. Again and again they keep the frenzied enemy at bay. Have you ever seen Harvard holding the Yale eleven on the five-yard line three minutes before the call of time in the last half, with dark gathering so fast that you could hardly distinguish crimson from blue? Do you remember Yale’s ferocious first, second, third, yet always vain, attempts to batter and plunge her way through Harvard’s concrete, immobile phalanx? If you do, and if your red-blooded heart has tingled at some such spectacle of young American bulldoggedness, which can be seen West as well as East, in the North and in the South, just as commonly as in the New Haven bowl, you will be able to visualize, infinitesimally, the titanic grapple around Dixmude, Ypres and the Yser in the bloody days and hellish nights of October and November, 1914. "The Watch in the Mud" was the way German military critics paraphrased their national anthem, to describe the situation in Flanders, for the Belgians had now flooded the region contiguous to the Yser Canal, and the Kaiser’s legions, in their breathless thrust for Calais, were fighting in mire and slush to their boot-tops. More than one company of _Feldgrauer_ was ingloriously drowned.