Indeed it was just there, in the blood-drenched marshes of the Yser, that for the second time, and finally, the onrush of the barbarians was broken. The two great decisive reverses suffered by that wretched Emperor of the blood-stained hands were, everyone knows, the retreat from the Marne and then that check in Belgium, in the face of a very small handful of sailors of superhuman tenacity. They were not specially selected, these men sublimely stubborn; no, they were the first to hand, chosen hastily from among the men in our ports. They had not even gone away to fight, but quietly to police the streets of Paris, and from Paris, one fine day, in the extremity of our peril, they were dispatched to the Yser, without preparation, inadequately equipped, with barely sufficient food, and told simply: "Let yourselves be killed, but do not suffer the German beast to pass! At all costs resist for at least a week, to give us time to come to the rescue." Now they held out, it will be remembered, indefinitely, in the midst of a veritable inferno of fire, shrapnel, clamour, crumbling ruins, cold, rain, engulfing mud, and ever since that day when they brought to a standstill the onrush of the beast, France felt that she was saved indeed. Indeed, as a general rule, it is sufficient to take any honest fellows whatsoever, and merely by putting a blue collar on them, you transform them into heroes. In the Chinese expedition, among other instances, I have seen at close quarters the very same thing: a small handful of men, taken haphazard from one of our ships, commanded by very young officers who had only just attained their first band of gold braid, and this assembly of men, hastily mustered, suddenly became a force complete in itself, admirable, united, disciplined, zealous, fearless, capable of performing within a couple of days prodigies of endurance and daring.