And so they tied him against the stem of his pigeon-cote. He met his death as a gallant gentleman of France. The girl. Ah, young and tender! Good sport for the plucking! First let her bury the old man. "Rather hard work using a spade when you're not used to it, isn't it?--Done? Good, now get us dinner." After dinner, a dance--Eastern slave fashion. First, good sport for the officers. "When we have finished throw her to the men." What need to tell the horrors of it? The village marked the ebb of the tide. The French and British had turned at last. Hurried orders came to retire at dawn. The girl had not been such good sport after all--fainted too easily. A leering, drunken satyr slashes at her naked breasts with his bayonet and Jeannette falls dead over the threshold. The house is fired, the body is pitched on to the pyre. One village in France? No, one of a hundred where such things were done. And this is almost as nothing beside such as this England of ours has, by God's gracious mercy, been spared. What does England know of this war? * * * * * Now the various units begin to converge and concentrate on the French frontier. "Each unit," says the G.O.C.-in-Chief in his first dispatch, "arrived at its destination in this country well within the scheduled time." For some days past the French troop trains have been disgorging their living freight at a number of stations and sidings, most of them hastily improvised, within a few miles' radius on a line Valenciennes-Maubeuge. The columns which came by road halted in various little villages about the town of Le Cateau. You will get the general lie of the land and the principal points of interest from the picture-map. Now to set the stage. CHAPTER V THE MARSHALLING OF THE ARMIES _Now entertain conjecture of a time, When creeping murmur, and the poring dark, Fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night, The hum of either army stilly sounds,_ * * * * * _..... and from the tents, The armourers, accomplishing the knights, With busy hammers closing rivets up, Give dreadful note of preparation._ A well-known American, it was probably Roosevelt, remarked à propos of the outbreak of the War that Germany's readiness would redound to her eternal dishonour, while Britain's unreadiness would be to her eternal honour. The term "unready" applies to the nation as a whole. Fortunately for civilisation the British Navy and the little striking Force were, as we have seen, kept trained to an hour. And so it was that, upon a single word, the whole machine moved precisely as the admirable organisation had planned for it.