In the meantime her
whole population, except those slackers every country had, had put its
strenuous hand to war work of one kind or another. So, whether by sea or
land or air, whether as warriors or as civilians, the people of Great
Britain gave their united all to the noblest cause on earth. And, when
the war ended, Great Britain had the biggest army as well as the biggest
navy in the world--biggest not only in absolute numbers but also biggest
in proportion to the whole number of men fit to bear arms. Nor was this
in any way due to her having lost less than others; for she had the
greatest total loss in killed and wounded of all the Allies--greatest on
land, greatest by sea, and greatest in the air.
Besides all we have seen before, in following the more purely naval
fortunes of the war, the Navy did priceless work in October 1914, when
the huge German armies, beaten by the heroic French at the immortal
Battle of the Marne, tried to take the North-East coast of France with
the ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne. Held by Joffre further
south, they found more than their match in the north, when French's
little British army fought them to a standstill, while the Navy simply
burnt them away from the coast by a perfect hurricane of fire.
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