The British were engaged in precisely the operation for which their temperament best fits them--"holding." The German attack rocked against them remorselessly, giving neither assailant nor defender rest or quarter. But the bulldog "held." He was mauled unconscionably and bled profusely. Thousands upon thousands of his teeth were knocked out, and he was half-blind, and limped. Yet he "held." Winter had come. Men lived in trenches which had been merely water-logged ditches, but were now frozen into rock. The German eagle, hammered, of course, no less cruelly than the bulldog, was still screaming and clawing, in his mad desire to cleave a way to Calais. But, mangled and scarred as he was, the bulldog barked "No!" He had set his squatty bow-legs, disjointed though they were, squarely across "the Road to Calais." There he intended to stay. It could be traversed, that road, only through a welter of blood which, regardless as German commanders are of the cost when they set themselves an objective, gave the General Staff at Berlin furiously to ponder. I have already intimated that Britain all this tempestuous while was rubbing her eyes, but was only partially open-eyed. It was not altogether Britain’s fault. The immutable Censorship still gave the public no real glimmer of the history-making struggle going on almost within ear-shot of the chalk-cliffs of Dover. Throughout the entire month of October, four weeks as crammed with death and glory as in all England’s martial history, Sir John French was permitted to take the public into his confidence but on one single occasion--and that, a dispatch dealing with operations six weeks old! For its news of the heroic deeds and Spartan sufferings of the greatest army it ever sent abroad, the British Empire was compelled to depend on stilted French _communiques_ and the fantastic or irrelevant narratives of an official "eye-witness at British Headquarters," who was allowed to bamboozle the nation for months before his flow of mediocrity and piffle was choked off by disgruntled public opinion. England was fighting her greatest war in Cimmerian darkness. Casualty lists, terrible in their regularity and magnitude, kept on coming, but of the coincident imperishable triumphs of British sacrifice and courage, not a word. One’s _Illustrated London News_ and _Sphere_ printed depressing double-pages weekly, filled with pictures of England’s masculine flower killed in action "somewhere in France" or "somewhere in Flanders." But of the manner in which their precious lives had been laid down, of the price they had made the Germans pay for them, not a syllable. If by accident some correspondent or newspaper secured the account of an engagement, which ventured so much as to hint with some picturesqueness of detail how Englishmen were dying, the Press Bureau guillotine came down on the narrative with a crash which taught the offender to mend his ways for the future.