Page:Generals of the British Army.djvu/68

 The Germans had secretly concentrated behind their screen of cavalry in Belgium. Sordets' cavalry had made a gallant raid through the country without gaining any sure information of where the main enemy forces lay. The French had made tentative moves eastward without finding any great force in their path. So the third week of the war dawned with no trustworthy evidence of the existence of that huge force that was to make its gallop to Paris. In such circumstances Sir John French landed with his staff. The Allies were groping in the dark and the British Army was cast for a role that it never had a chance of performing. Suddenly the German force emerged from behind its concealing curtain of horse. Without any trace of hesitation it moved westward over Belgium. Everything was in its place. Uniforms were new and fresh. Every scientific aid was in use, and the whole super-structure of the Allied strategy began to disappear. But only the super-structure.

It seems strange now to state that the role of the British Army was to outflank the German right wing. With our present knowledge of the sequence of events it is difficult to think that it was ever possible. The German Army had been trained for speed, and the German policy was based on getting in the first blow. When it fell it found the Allies unprepared. A full half-million picked German troops marched across Belgium on the 20th and 21st of August; but when the first encounters began on the Sambre the British Armies were not in their positions. The first Allied plan was already impracticable before the British Army took its place about Mons and prepared to give battle. The Sambre line could be no longer maintained; but the British commander, not yet notified of the fact, set himself to the forlorn hope of forbidding the advance of an army many times greater than his own force.

The Battle of Mons was decided before it had begun; and the troops who were compelled to retreat had planned quite another sort of episode. Sir John French and his Generals had to retire in haste from the peril of being surrounded and cut off.

At some phases of long drawn out war of positions it was forgotten that the Army which first took the field had to face the war of movements, and that only their astounding skill and courage enabled them to cope