ABSTRACT
It was pitch dark in the British lines at two o’clock in the morning. All soldiers except the sentries were buried in the deep sleep of extreme fatigue, and even the latter stood tottering with heads bent over their rifles. Feeble lights flashed here and there from windows of cottages and farmhouses where generals had established their quarters. The dead silence was only broken by confused murmurs which came from Chatham. The whole British army, a vast multitude of nearly a quarter of a million men, was buried in an immense ocean of darkness and silence typical of the death about to annihilate it. But the generals sat in their quarters all night, poring over maps by candlelight, trying to learn some geography of the locality before morning, and wrangling over plans. The overwhelming numbers of the German armies were now generally known to the British leaders who were also aware that the capture of Maidstone had placed their right wing in serious danger. A terrible fear now crept over everyone that the battle would end in a crushing disaster to the British arms. But most of the generals thought that the army could maintain its present position with the river and town at its back for days. Since the South African War it had become an article of military religion that a frontal attack was an impossibility. Because the British army extended in a great semicircle with the Medway curved behind it, they believed it to be perfectly safe, for the time at any rate. But some wanted a forward movement so that a crushing defeat might be inflicted on the presumptuous Germans. A few pessimists thought the position of the British army exceedingly dangerous and predicted an overwhelming disaster should the regiments ever give way.
