There is a popular idea that Napoleon was a super-genius who won all his battles alone. It is wrong. He had a lot of Frenchmen along to help. Much the same kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until they fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the excitable Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralised in face of German organisation, merely talks with his hands. In a great crisis he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their democracy and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war to France and Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans. For it is just possible that God is not in the fight. We don’t know that He even approved of the war.
Calais, the objective of a struggle for world power--Last reserves of the British--A city of refugees--Heroic care of the wounded--“Life going on as usual”--The cheerful Belgians--In a French hospital--An astonished but happy Tommy.
To the traveller, Calais had been the symbol of the shortest route from London to Paris, the shortest spell of torment in crossing the British Channel. It was a point where one felt infinite relief or sad physical anticipations. In the last days of November Calais became the symbol of a struggle for world power. The British and the French were fighting to hold Calais; the Germans to get it. In Calais Germany would have her foot on the Atlantic coast. She could look across only twenty-two miles of water to the chalk cliffs at Dover. She would be as near her rival as twice the length of Manhattan Island; within the range of a modern gun; within an hour by steamer and twenty minutes by aeroplane.
The long battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea had been established. There was no getting around the Allied flank; there had ceased to be a flank. To win Calais, Germany must crush through without any manœuvre by main force. From the cafés where the British newspaper men gathered England received its news, which they gleaned from refugees and stragglers and passing officers. They wrote something every day, for England must have something about that dizzy head-on wrestle in the mud, that writhing line of changing positions, of new trenches rising behind the old destroyed by German artillery. The British were fighting with their last reserves on the Ypres-Armentieres line. The French divisions to the south were suffering no less heavily, and beyond them the Belgians were trying to hold the last strip of their land under Belgian sovereignty. Cordons of guards which kept back the observer from the struggle could not keep back the truth. Something ominous was in the air.