The fact that it was the British Army which stood between this vast mass of armed men and its projected advance was in all probability not entirely a matter of chance. If the attempt to break through either at Ypres or La Bassée had succeeded, the little British force would either have been wiped out, or hopelessly disgraced in the eyes of its allies. In either case the prestige of England would have received a rude shock; and, with a German base established at Calais, she would have been in imminent danger of losing something more than prestige. The fact, then, that the Kaiser's selected road to Calais or Paris, as the case might be, lay through the thirty miles of front held by the British troops, was in all probability part of a carefully-thought-out plan. One factor in the case, however, had been overlooked, or at least under-rated, viz.--the indomitable tenacity of the British soldier in the face of difficulties. Of this essentially British quality the Germans had as yet had no practical experience. At Mons and Le Cateau we had dropped back before their onslaughts--dropped back, it is true, in obedience to orders, and in conformity with a pre-arranged plan. Still, we had dropped back. At the Aisne there had been no serious attempt on the part of the enemy to break through our lines. Such had not been part of the German programme at the moment. It was therefore not wholly unnatural, that the very thin British line between Givenchy and Ypres, should have been reckoned at German Head Quarters as being penetrable at any point where sufficient pressure was brought to bear. In the face of beliefs such as these, the stone-wall resistance put up by our three war-worn Army Corps must have been a source of equal astonishment and exasperation to the wire-pullers in Berlin. To the Britisher it must always bring a thrill of justifiable pride. Many of the regiments engaged were technically "annihilated." Their officers went; their senior N.C.O.'s went; they were worn to the last stage of mental and physical exhaustion by sleeplessness, and by unceasing digging and fighting. And still they held on. There were no "hands uppers" among these men from Britain. We gave ground, of course, both in the La Bassée area and at Ypres. In the latter case a withdrawal of some kind was dictated by every consideration of military prudence. The original bulge was a danger from every point of view, and with no compensating advantage. It thinned our line and laid us open at all times to the risk of enfilading attacks from north and south.