Sheer inability to sit idle, no less than patriotism, urged them to drive cars and ambulances, to raise funds and equip hospitals, to take the places of their own clerks or gardeners and to toil at the routine of a public office. Dependent on censored newspapers, jejune letters and ill-informed gossip, England was an uneasy home in the unfamiliar days when the whole world was first seething with war. To men past middle-age the news-bills recalled the names of places which they had forgotten since the time, forty-four years earlier, when another German army was pouring into France; would this onrush, all wondered, be as irresistible? Morning after morning the converging black lines of the German advance raced down the map, ever nearer to Paris; one Sunday the notorious "Amiens despatch" prepared its readers for the news that the entire expeditionary force had been encircled. Men, more men and yet more men were the crying need; the order had gone forth and volunteers were to be enrolled by the hundred thousand; but, until they could be trained to an equality with the professional soldiers of Germany, a veritable human breakwater was required to prevent France from being submerged. It is small wonder--the wish being parent to the thought--that some accepted unhesitatingly from excited neighbours that twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand Russians, secretly embarked at Arkangel and disembarked at Aberdeen, were passing as secretly through England to a southern port; letters from Scotland told of cars commandeered to divide the stream between the east-coast route and the west; the amateur strategist demonstrated with atlas and encyclopædia that Arkangel could be kept ice-free until September; and it was both pleasanter and easier to believe the man who claimed to have spoken to the mysterious troops in Russian than to enquire what facilities existed for transporting a single brigade to the northern coast of Russia.[26] At the same time, in London and in the country, impromptu local committees of relief applied for unoccupied cottages and houses, for furniture and bedding, for food and money to be distributed among the Belgians who had sought asylum in England; in those days, though the Englishman and the Belgian never pretended to feel personal cordiality towards each other, the decision of King Albert to uphold the neutrality of his country was ungrudgingly voted one of the bravest political acts in history; the brief defence of Liége was at least long and unexpected enough to hold up the annihilating German advance for precious hours while the British expeditionary force effected its union with the French army; nothing, in consequence, was too good for the victims of German treachery and of their own honour; and, until it became a legitimate form of English humour to describe a Belgian refugee as a Belgian atrocity, these dazed and ruined outcasts were received with liberality and general kindness.