Map showing Position of Armies.
Before we go any further we must look closely at the position of the French armies marked 2 and 3 on the map. You notice that they form a sharp angle with each other. Military men call any angle less than two right angles a salient. I think you can easily see that the armies holding such a salient as that formed by the two rivers were by no means in a strong position. They were very much exposed to attacks on their flanks, and they depended at their weakest part—the point of the angle—on the fortress of Namur. As long as Namur held out, well and good; but if it should fall the line would be pierced, and the French would be in a very dangerous position indeed.
CHAPTER III.
THE FALL OF NAMUR.
Now let us look more closely at the position which the British were to hold.[14] Find the town of Mons, which stands to the west of Charleroi,[15] on the highroad running northward to Brussels. Mons is the old capital of Hainault, and its history goes back to the days of Cæsar. Those of our soldiers who came from colliery districts must have been strongly reminded of home when they arrived in the neighbourhood of Mons, for it is a place of busy factories, surrounded by a coalfield. Tall chimneys, the headgear of pits, huge mounds of refuse, railway lines running along embankments, and miners' cottages are the chief features of the landscape. Many of the rubbish heaps have been planted with little forests of dwarf firs, and look like ranges of low wooded hills. The country is, however, flat and much cut up with deep dykes filled with muddy water.
The British headquarters was at Mons, and the line which our soldiers were to hold extended to the west and to the east of that town. On the west it stretched along the banks of a canal which runs west for fifteen miles, from Mons to the village of Condé. Still farther to the west, a French Territorial battalion held the town of Tournai. Eastward of Mons the line ran for another ten miles to the village of Binche, which lies south-east of Mons. The British position, you will observe, was not quite straight, but in the form of a very flat triangle, with the apex at Mons. By the evening of Friday, 21st August, two army corps and one cavalry division of the British were in position awaiting the German attack. The 3rd Army Corps had not yet arrived.
