And now as the year drew to its close, Germany, wounded and weary, saw as she glared round her at her enemies, a portent which must have struck a chill to her heart. Russian strength had been discounted and that of France was no new thing. But whence came this apparition upon her Western flank--a host raised, as it seemed, from nowhere, and yet already bidding fair to be equal to her own? Her public were still ignorant and blind, bemused by the journals which had told them so long, and with such humorous detail, that the British army was a paper army, the creature of a dream. Treitschke's foolish phrase, "The unwarlike Islanders," still lingered pleasantly in their memory. But the rulers, the men who knew, what must have been their feelings as they gazed upon that stupendous array, that vision of doom, a hundred miles from wing to wing, gleaming with two million bayonets, canopied with aeroplanes, fringed with iron-clad motor monsters, and backed by an artillery which numbered its guns by the thousand? Kitchener lay deep in the Orkney waves, but truly his spirit was thundering at their gates. His brain it was who first planted these seeds, but how could they have grown had the tolerant, long-suffering British nation not been made ready for it by all those long years of Teutonic insult, the ravings of crazy professors, and the insults of unbalanced publicists? All of these had a part in raising that great host, but others, too, can claim their share: the baby-killers of Scarborough, the {332} Zeppelin murderers, the submarine pirates, all the agents of ruthlessness. Among them they had put life and spirit into this avenging apparition, where even now it could be said that every man in the battle line had come there of his own free will. Years of folly and of crime were crying for a just retribution. The instrument was here and the hour was drawing on. {333} INDEX Adlam, Lieutenant, V.C., 272 Air Service, 38, 39 Albert, 66 Alderson, General Sir Edwin, 21 Allenby, General Sir Edmund, 11, 34 Alsace, 3 Ancre, battle of the: work of the Naval Division, 315-321; capture of Beaumont Hamel, 320-322; attack on Grandcourt, 324-326 Anderson, Colonel, 326 Arbuthnot, Rear-Admiral Sir Robert, 31 Armenia, invasion of, by Russians, 3 Arnim, General von, report on the battle of the Somme, 308 Ash, Colonel, 246 Asquith, Lieutenant Raymond, 169 Asquith, Mr., 330 Atkinson, Major, 211 Babington, General, 117 Bapaume, 66 Bazentin-le-Grand, 144, 151-152 Bazentin-le-Petit, 144, 145, 146-149 Bean, Mr., Australian chronicler, quoted, 201, 202 Beaucourt-sur-Ancre, 59, 60 Beaumont Hamel, 46, 47, 52-56, 58, 86, 200, 280, 315, 320-322 Bécourt, 67, 76 Becquincourt, 100 Bernard, Colonel, 62 Bircham, Colonel, 161 Bird wood, General Sir William, 190 Blake, Captain, 284 British front in France extended, 4, 11 Brocklehurst, Captain, 183 Brooke, Rupert, 169 Brown, Major Hall, 121 Brusiloff, General, 327 Bucharest, fall of, 329