Chapter VII: Part I: The Descent (5)

But in other cases the papers passed whole from hand to hand, and their holders read the news aloud. I think the entire crowd had grasped the gist of it inside of four minutes; and their exclamatory comments were extraordinary, grotesque.

"My God!" and "My Gawd!" reached my ears frequently. But they were less representative than were short, sharp bursts of laughter, harsh and staccato, like a dog's bark, and, it may be, half-hysterical. And, piercing these snaps of laughter, one heard the curious, contradictory yapping of such sentences as: "I sye; 'ow about them 'ot sossiges?" "'Taint true, Bill, is it?" "Disgraceful business; perfectly disgraceful!" "Wot price the Kaiser? Not arf!" "Anything to sell the papers, you know!" "What? No. Jolly lot of rot!" "Johnny get yer gun, get yer gun!" "Some one must be punished for this. Might have caused a panic, you know." "True? Good Lord, no! What would our Navy be doing?" "Well, upon my word, I don't know." "Nice business for the fish trade!" "Well, if that's it, I shall take the children down to their Aunt Rebecca's." "Wot price Piccadilly an' Regent Street to-night?" "Come along, my dear; let's get home out of this." "Absolute bosh, my dear boy, from beginning to end--doing business with 'em every day o' my life!" And then a hoarse snatch of song: "'They'll never go for England'--not they! What ho! 'Because England's got the dibs!'"

Suddenly then, above and across the thousand-voiced small talk, came the trained notes of the voice of the President of the Local Government Board.

"My friends, the whole story is a most transparent fraud. It's a shameful hoax. I tell you the thing is physically and morally impossible. It couldn't have been done in the time; and it is all a lie, anyhow. I beg to propose a hearty vote of thanks to our chairman for----"

The crowd had listened attentively enough to the old agitator's comment on the news. They liked his assurances on that point. But they were in no mood for ceremonial. Thousands were already straggling across the grass toward Marble Arch and down to Hyde Park Corner. The speaker's further words were drowned in a confused hubbub of applause, cheers, laughter, shouts of "Are we downhearted?" raucous answers in the negative, and cries of "Never mind the chairman!" and "He's a jolly good fellow!"

In ten minutes that part of the park seemed to have been stripped naked, and the few vehicles, tables, and little platforms which had formed the centre of the Demonstration appeared, like the limbs of a tree suddenly bereft of foliage, looking curiously small and bare. I am told that restaurants and refreshment places did an enormous trade during the next few hours. When the public-houses opened they were besieged, and, in many cases, closed again after a few hours, sold out.

For my part, I made at once, and without thinking, for Constance Grey's flat in South Kensington. The crowds in the streets were not only much larger, but in many ways different from the usual run of Sunday crowds. The people wore their Sunday clothes, but they had doffed the Sunday manners and air. There was more of a suggestion of Saturday night in the streets; the suggestion that a tremendous number of people were going to enjoy a "spree" of some kind. A kind of noisy hilarity, combined with a general desire for cigars, drinks, singing, and gaiety, seemed to be ruling the people.

At the upper end of Sloane Street a German band was blaring out the air of "The Holy City," and people stood about in groups laughing and chatting noisily. The newspaper boys had some competitors now, and the Bank Holiday flavour of the streets was added to by a number of lads and girls who had appeared from nowhere, with all sorts of valueless commodities for sale, such as peacocks' feathers, paper fans, and streamers of coloured paper.

Why these things should have been wanted I cannot say; but their sellers knew their business very well. The demand was remarkably brisk. Indeed, I noticed one of three young men, who walked abreast, purchase quite a bunch of the long feathers, only to drop them beside the curb a few moments later, whence another vendor promptly plucked them, and sold them again. I suppose that by this time the vast majority of the people had no doubt whatever about the news being a monstrous hoax; but there was no blinking the fact that the public had been strongly moved.

It was with a distinct sense of relief that I learned from a servant that Miss Grey was at home--had just come in, as a matter of fact. It was as though I had some important business to transact with this girl from South Africa, with her brilliant dark eyes, and alert, thoughtful expression. I felt that it would have been serious if she should have been away, if I had missed her. It was not until I heard her step outside the door of the little drawing-room into which I had been shown, that I suddenly became conscious that I had no business whatever with Constance Grey, and that this call, on Sunday, within forty-eight hours of my dining there, might perhaps be adjudged a piece of questionable taste.

A minute later, and, if I had thought again of the matter at all, I should have known that Constance Grey wasted no time over any such petty considerations. She entered to me with a set, grave face, taking my hand mechanically, as though too much preoccupied for such ceremonies.

"What do you think of the news?" she said, without a word of preliminary greeting. I felt more than a little abashed at this; for, truth to tell, I really had given no serious thought to the news. I had observed its reception by the public as a spectator might. But, in the first place, I had been early warned that it was all a hoax; and then, too, like so many of my contemporaries, I was without the citizen feeling altogether, so far as national interests were concerned. I had grown to regard citizenship as exclusively a matter of domestic politics and social progress, municipal affairs, and the like. I never gave any thought to our position as a people and a nation in relation to foreign Powers.

"Oh, well," I said, "it's an extraordinary business, isn't it? I have just come from the Demonstration in Hyde Park. It was practically squashed by the arrival of the special editions. The people seemed pretty considerably muddled about it, so I suppose those who arranged it all may be said to have scored their point."

"So you don't believe it?"

"Well, I believe it is generally admitted to be a gigantic hoax, is it not?"

"But, my dear Mr. Mordan, how--how wonderful English people are! You, your own self; what do _you_ think about it? But forgive me for heckling. Won't you sit down? Or will you come into the study? Aunt is in there."

We went into the study, a cheerful, bright room, with low wicker chairs, and a big, littered writing-table.

"Mr. Mordan doesn't believe it," said Constance Grey, when I had shaken hands with her aunt.

"Doesn't he?" said that strong, plain-spoken woman. "Well, I fancy there are a good many more by the same way of thinking, who'll have their eyes opened pretty widely by this time to-morrow."

"Then you take the whole thing seriously?" I asked them.

Somehow, my own thoughts had become active in the presence of these women, and were racing over everything that I had seen and heard that day, from the moment of my chat with Wardle, before sunrise, in Holborn.

"I don't see any other way to take it," said Mrs. Van Homrey, with laconic emphasis. "Do you?" she added.

"Well, you see, I did not begin by taking your view. My first word of it was just before dawn this morning, from a newspaper man in Holborn; and, somehow--well, you know, the general idea seems to be that the whole thing is an elaborate joke worked up by the Navy League, or somebody, as a counter-stroke to the Disarmament Demonstration--to teach us a lesson, and all that, you know."

I had to remind myself that I was addressing two ladies who were sure to be whole-hearted supporters of the Navy League and all other Imperialist organizations. Constance Grey seemed to me to be appraising me. I fancied those brilliant eyes of hers were looking right into me with grave criticism, and discovering me unworthy. My heart sickened at the thought. I should have been more distressed had not a vague, futile anger crept into my mind. After all, I thought, what right had this girl from South Africa to criticize me? I was a man. I knew England better than she did. I was a journalist of experience. Bah! My twopenny thoughts drooped and fainted as they rose.

"But perhaps you are better informed?" I said, weakly. "Perhaps you have other information?"

Constance Grey looked straight at me, and as I recall her gaze now, it was almost maternal in its yearning gravity.

"I think it's going to be a lesson all right," she said. "What cuts me to the heart is the fear that it may have come too late."

Never have I heard such gravity in a young woman's voice. Her words overpowered me almost by the weight of prescient meaning she gave them. They reached me as from some solemn sanctuary, a fount of inspiration.

"We haven't any special information," said Mrs. Van Homrey. "We have only read, like every one else, that East Anglia is occupied by German soldiers, landed last night; that the East Anglian Pageant has been made the cloak of most elaborate preparations for weeks past; that the Mediterranean incident last week was a deliberate scheme to draw the Channel Fleet south; and that the whole dreadful business has succeeded so far, like--like perfect machinery; like the thing it is: the outcome of perfect discipline and long, deliberate planning. We have heard no more; but the only hoaxing that I can see is done by the purblind people who have made the public think it a hoax--and that is not conscious hoaxing, of course; they are too bemuddled with their disarmament farce for that."

"More tragedy than farce, aunt, I'm afraid," said Constance Grey. And then, turning to me, she said: "We lunched at General Penn Dicksee's to-day; and they have no doubt about the truth of the news. The General has motored down to Aldershot. They will begin some attempt at mobilizing at once, I believe. But it seemed impossible to get into touch with headquarters. All the War Office people are away for the week-end. In fact, they say the Minister's in Ipswich, and can't get away. General Penn Dicksee says they have practically no material to work with for any immediate mobilization purposes. He says that under the present system nothing can be done in less than a week. He thinks the most useful force will be the sailors from the Naval Barracks. But I should suppose they would be wanted for the ships--if we have any ships left fit for sea. The General thinks there may be a hundred thousand German soldiers within twenty or thirty miles of London by to-morrow."

"Yes," said Mrs. Van Homrey, "it doesn't seem easy to take it any other way than seriously; not if one's on the British side. And, for the matter of that, if I know the Teuton, they are taking it pretty seriously in East Anglia, and--and in Berlin."

And up till now, I had been thinking of the extra Sunday work for Wardle, and the way they had started selling peacocks' feathers and things, in the streets!

XV

SUNDAY NIGHT IN LONDON

. . .

"Ah," they cry, "Destiny,
Prolong the present!
Time, stand still here!"

The prompt stern Goddess
Shakes her head, frowning;
Time gives his hour-glass
Its due reversal;
Their hour is gone.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

I stayed to dinner at the flat in South Kensington, and after dinner, when I spoke of leaving, Constance Grey asked if I would care to accompany her into Blackfriars. She wanted to call at Printing House Square, and ascertain what further news had arrived. The implied intimacy and friendliness of the suggestion gave me a pleasurable thrill; it came as something of a reinstatement for me, and compensated for much. Constance Grey's views of me had in some way become more important to me than anything else. I was even now more concerned about that than about the news.

We made the journey by omnibus. I suggested a cab, as in duty bound, but, doubtless with a thought of my finances, my companion insisted upon the cheaper way. We had some trouble to get seats, but found them at last on a motor omnibus bound for Whitechapel. The streets were densely crowded, and the Bank Holiday spirit which I had remarked before was now general, and much more marked.

"It reminds me exactly of 'Mafeking Night,'" I said, referring to that evening of the South African war during which London waxed drunk upon the news of the relief of Mafeking.

"Was it as bad even then?" said my companion. And her question showed me, what I might otherwise have overlooked, that a good deal of water had passed under the bridges since South African war days. We had been a little ashamed of our innocent rowdiness over the Mafeking relief. We had become vastly more inconsistent and less sober since then. I think the "Middle Class Music Halls" had taken their share in the progress, by breaking down much of the staid reserve and self-restraint of the respectable middle class. But, of course, one sees now that the rapid growth among us of selfish irresponsibility and repudiation of national obligations was the root cause of that change in public behaviour which I saw clearly enough, once it had been suggested to me by Constance Grey's question.

I saw that, among the tens of thousands of noisy promenaders of both sexes who filled the streets, and impeded traffic at all crossings, the class which had always been rowdily inclined was now far more rowdy, and that its ranks were reinforced, doubled in strength, by recruits from a class which, a few years before, had been proverbially noted for its decorous and decent reserve. And this was Sunday Night. I learned afterwards that the clergy had preached to practically empty churches. A man we met in _The Times_ office told us of this, and my companion's comment was:

"Yes, even their religion has less meaning for them than their pleasure; and, with religion a dead letter, the spirit that won Trafalgar and armed the Thames against Napoleon, must be dead and buried."

The news we received at _The Times_ office was extraordinary. It seemed there was no longer room for the smallest doubt that a large portion of East Anglia was actually occupied by a German army. Positive details of information could not be obtained.

"The way the coastal districts have been hermetically sealed against communication, and the speed and thoroughness with which the occupation has been accomplished, will remain, I believe, the most amazing episode in the history of warfare," said the solemn graybeard, to whom I had been presented by Constance Grey. (If he had known that I was the assistant editor of _The Mass_, I doubt if this Mr. Poole-Smith would have consented to open his mouth in my presence. But my obscurity and his importance combined to shelter me, and I was treated with confidence as the friend of a respected contributor.)

"Already we know enough to be certain that the enemy has received incalculably valuable assistance from within. I am afraid there will presently be only too much evidence of the blackest kind of treachery from British subjects, members of one or other among the anti-National coteries. But in the meantime, we hear of extraordinary things accomplished by aliens employed in this country, many of them in official capacities. We have learned through the Great Eastern Railway Company, and through one or two shipping houses, of huge consignments of stores, and, I make very little doubt, of munitions of war. The thing must have been in train on this side for many months--possibly for years. Here, for instance, is an extraordinary item, which is hardly likely to be only coincidence: Out of one hundred postmasters within a sixty-mile radius of Harwich, eighty-one have obtained their positions within the last two years, and of those sixty-nine bear names which indicate German nationality or extraction. But that is only one small item. An analysis of the Eastern Railway employees, and of the larger business firms between here and Ipswich, will tell a more startling tale, unless I am greatly mistaken."

But to me, I think the part of the news we gathered which seemed most startling was the fact that a tiny special issue of _The Times_, then being sold in the streets, contained none of the information given to us, but only a cautiously worded warning to the public that the news received from East Anglia had been grossly exaggerated, and that no definite importance should be attached to it, until authoritative information, which would appear in the first ordinary issue of _The Times_ on Monday, had been considered. It was all worded very pompously, and vaguely, in a deprecating tone, which left it open for the reader to conclude that _The Times_ supported the generally accepted hoax theory. And we found that all the daily papers of repute and standing had issued similar bulletins to the public. Asked about this, our grave informant stroked his whiskers, and alluded distantly to "policy decided upon in consultation with representatives of the Crown."

"For one thing, you see, London is extraordinarily full of Germans, though we have already learned that vast numbers of them went to swell the attendance at the East Anglian Pageant, and may now, for all we know, be under arms. Then, too, anything in the nature of a panic on a large scale, and that before the authorities have decided upon any definite plan of action, would be disastrous. Unfortunately our reports from correspondents at the various southern military depots are all to the effect that mobilization will be a slow business. As you know, the regulars in England have been reduced to an almost negligible minimum, and the mobilization of the 'Haldane Army' involves the slow process of drawing men out of private life into the field. What is worse, it means in many cases Edinburgh men reporting themselves at Aldershot, and south-country men reporting themselves in the north. And then their practical knowledge so far leaves them simply men in the street.

"But the great trouble is that the Government and the official heads of departments have been at loggerheads this long time past, and now are far from arriving at any definite policy of procedure. Of course, the majority of the leaders are out of town. You will understand that every possible precaution must be taken to avoid unduly alarming the public, or provoking panic. We hope to be able to announce something definite in the morning. The sympathy of all the Powers will undoubtedly be with us, for every known tenet of international law has been outraged by this entirely unprovoked invasion."

"And what do you think will be the practical effect and use of their sympathy, Mr. Poole-Smith?" asked Constance Grey.

"Well," said our solemn friend, caressing his whiskers, "as to its _practical_ effect, my dear Miss Grey, why, I am afraid that in such bitter matters as these the practical value of sympathy, or of international law, is--er--cannot very easily be defined."

"Quite so. Exactly as I thought. It would not make one pennyworth of difference, Mr. Poole-Smith. The British public is on the eve of learning the meaning of brave old Lord Roberts's teaching: that no amount of diplomacy, of 'cordiality,' of treaties, or of anything else in the repertoire of the disarmament party, can ever counterbalance the uses of the rifle in the hands of disciplined men. Their twentieth-century notions will avail us pitifully little against the advance of the Kaiser's legions. The brotherhood of man and the sacred arts of commerce and peace will have little in the way of reply to machine guns. If only our people could have had even one year of universal military training! But no; they would not even pay for the maintenance of such defence force as they had when it took three years to beat the Boers; and now--didn't some man write a book called 'The Defenceless Isles'? We live in them."

"But that is not the worst, Miss Grey," said our friend. "These are now not only defenceless, but invaded isles."

"Ah! How long before they become surrendered isles, Mr. Poole-Smith?"

"The answer to that is with a higher Power than any in Printing House Square, Miss Grey. But, let me say this, in strict confidence, please. You wonder, and perhaps are inclined to condemn our--well, our reticence about this news. Do you know my fear? It is that if, in its present mood, suddenly, the British public, and more especially the London public, were allowed to realize clearly both what has happened in East Anglia, and the monumental unfitness of our authorities and defences to meet and cope with such an emergency--that then we should see England torn in sunder by the most terrible revolution of modern times. We should see statesmen hanging from lamp-posts in Whitehall; 'The Destroyers' would be destroyed; the Crown would be in danger, as well as its unworthy servants. And the Kaiser's machine-like army would find it had invaded a ravaged inferno, occupied by an infuriated populace hopelessly divided against itself, and already in the grip of the deadliest kind of strife. That, I think, is a danger to be guarded against, so far as it is possible, at all or any cost."

One could not but be impressed by this rather pompous, but sincere and earnest man's words.

"I see that very clearly, Mr. Poole-Smith," said Constance Grey. "But can the thing be done? Can the public be deluded for more than a few hours?"

"Not altogether, my dear young lady, not altogether. But, as we learn early in journalism, life is made up of compromises. We hope to school them to it, and give them the truth gradually, with as little shock as may be."

Soon after this we left the great office, and, as we passed out into the crowded streets, Constance Grey said to me:

"Thank God, _The Times_ managed to win clear of the syndicate's clutches when it did. There is moral and strength of purpose there now. I think the Press is behaving finely--if only the public can be made to do as well. But, oh, 'The Destroyers'--what a place they have cut out for themselves in history!"

But for the glorious summer weather, one could have fancied Christmas at hand from the look of Ludgate Hill. From the Circus we took a long look up at Paul's great dome, massive and calm against the evening sky. But between it and us was a seething crowd, promenading at the rate of a mile an hour, and served by two solid lines of vendors of useless trifles and fruit, and so forth.

Crossing Ludgate Circus, as we fought our way to the steps of an omnibus, was a band of youths linked arm in arm, and all apparently intoxicated. There must have been forty in a line. As they advanced, cutting all sorts of curious capers, they bawled, in something like unison, the melancholy music-hall refrain:

"They'll never go for England, because England's got the dibs."

The crowd caught up the jingle as fire licks up grass, and narrow Fleet Street echoed to the monstrous din of their singing. I began to feel anxious about getting Constance safely to her flat. Six out of the fourteen people on the top of our omnibus were noticeably and noisily tipsy.

"Ah me, Dick, where, where is their British reserve? How I hate that beloved word cosmopolitan!"

She looked at me, and perhaps that reminded her of something.

"Forgive my familiarity," she said. "John Crondall spoke of you as Dick Mordan. It's rather a way we have--out there."

I do not remember my exact reply, but it earned me the friendly short name from her for the future; and, with England tumbling about our ears, for aught we knew, that, somehow, made me curiously happy. But it was none the less with a sigh of relief that I handed her in at the outer door of the mansions in which their flat was situated. We paused for a moment at the stairs' foot, the first moment of privacy we had known that evening, and the last, I thought, with a recollection of Mrs. Van Homrey waiting in the flat above.

I know I was deeply moved. My heart seemed full to bursting. Perhaps the great news of that day affected me more than I knew. But yet it seemed I had no words, or very few. I remember I touched the sleeve of her dress with my finger-tips. What I said was:

"You know I am--you know I am at your orders, don't you?"

And she smiled, with her beautiful, sensitive mouth, while the light of grave watching never flickered in her eyes.

"Yes, Dick; and thank you!" she said, as we began to mount the stairs.

Yet I was still the assistant editor of _The Mass_--Clement Blaine's right hand.

XVI

A PERSONAL REVELATION

The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree
I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

BYRON.

That Sunday night was not one of London's black nights that have been so often described. The police began to be a little sharp with the people after nine or ten o'clock, and by midnight the streets were getting tolerably clear. For the great majority, I believe it had been a day of more or less pleasurable excitement and amusement. For the minority, who were better informed, it was a day and night of curious bewilderment and restless anxiety.

I looked in at several newspaper offices on my way home from South Kensington, but found that subordinate members of the staffs had no information to give, and that their superiors maintained an attitude of strict reticence. As I passed the dark windows of my own office I thought of our "feature" for the coming week: the demand for disarmament, in order that naval and military expenditure might be diverted into labour reform channels; Herr Mitmann's voluble assurances of the friendliness of the German people; of the ability and will of the German Socialists to make German aggression impossible, for the sake of their brother workers in England.

I thought of these things, and wished I could spurn under foot my connection with _The Mass_. Then, sitting at the window of my little bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, I looked into my petty finances. If I left Clement Blaine I had enough to subsist upon for six or eight weeks. It was a risky business. Then I pictured myself casually mentioning to Constance Grey that I was no longer connected with _The Mass_. I fancied that I saw the bright approval in her eyes. Before blowing my light out, I had composed the little speech to Blaine which, in the morning, should set a period to our connection.

And then I thought of Beatrice. It was barely twenty-four hours since we had parted beside Battersea Park (though it seemed more like twenty-four days), and recollection showed me Beatrice in her rather rumpled finery, with the bleakness of the gray hour that follows such pleasures as most appealed to her, beginning to steal over her handsome face, sapping its warm colour, thinning and sharpening its ripe, smooth contours. Beatrice would pout when she heard of my leaving her father. The thought showed me her full red lips, and the little even white teeth they so often disclosed.

The curves of Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how often, and how gaily she laughed.

In the midst of a picture of Beatrice, laughing at me across a restaurant table with a raised glass in her hand, I had a shadowy vision of Constance Grey beside the foot of the stairs in South Kensington. There was no laughter in her face. I had gathered, when I dined there, that Constance did not care for wine. She had said: "I don't care for anything that makes me feel as though I couldn't work if I wanted to." How Beatrice would have scoffed at that! And then, how Constance would have smiled over Beatrice's ideals--her "fluffy" evenings--in a kind of regretful, wondering way; almost as she had smiled when she first called me "Dick," in asking what had become of our staid English reserve; as she watched the noisy crowd in Fleet Street, singing its silly doggerel about England's security and England's "dibs."

And then, suddenly, my picture-making thoughts swept out across low Essex flats to the only part of East Anglia with which I was familiar, and gave me a vision of burning farmhouses, and terror-smitten country-folk fleeing blindly before a hail of bullets, and the pitiless advance of legions of fair-haired men in long coats of a kind of roan-gray, buttoned across the chest with bright buttons arranged to suggest the inward curve to an imaginary waist-line. The faces of the soldiers were all the same; they all had the face of Herr Mitmann of Stettin. And a hot wave of angry resentment and hatred of these machine-like invaders of a peaceful unprotected countryside pulsed through my veins. Could they dare--here on English soil? My fists clenched under the bed-clothes. If it was true, by heavens, there was work for Englishmen toward!

My blood was hot at the thought. It was perhaps the first swelling of a patriotic emotion I had known; the first hint of any larger citizenship than that which claims and demands, without thought of giving. And, immediately, it was succeeded by a sharp chill, a chill that ushered me into one of the bitterest moments of humiliation that I can remember. The thought accompanying that chill was this:

"What can you do? What are you fit for? What boy's part, even, can you take, though the roof were being burned over your mother's head? What of Constance, or Beatrice? Could you strike a blow for either? Work for Englishmen, forsooth! Yes, for those of them who have ever learned a man's part in such work. But you--you have never had a gun in your hand. What have you done? You have poured out for your weekly wage so many thousands of words; words meaning--what? Why, they have meant what the roadside beggar means: 'Give! Give! Give!' They have urged men to demand more from the State, and give the State nothing; to rob the State of even its defences, for the sake of adding to their own immediate ease. And you have ridiculed, as a survival of barbarous times, the efforts of such men as the brave old Field Marshal who gave his declining years to the thankless task of urging England to make some effort of preparation to fend off just that very crisis which has now come upon her, and found her absolutely unprepared. That is how you have earned your right to live, a citizen of the freest country in the world, a subject of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. And when you have had leisure and money to spend, you have devoted it to overeating and drinking, and helping to fill the tills of alien parasites in Soho. That has been your part. And now, now that the fatal crisis has arrived, you, whose qualification is that you can wield the pen of a begging letter-writer, who is also scurrilous and insolent--you lie in bed and clench your useless hands, and prate of work for Englishmen!"

That was the thought that came to me with a sudden chill that night; and I suppose I was one of the earliest among millions doomed to writhe under the impotent shame of such a thought. I shall never forget that night in my Bloomsbury lodging. It was my ordeal of self-revelation. I suppose I slept a little toward morning; but I rose early with a kind of vague longing to escape from the company of the personality my thought had shown me in the night.

It is natural that the awakening of an individual should be a more speedy process than the awakening of a people--a nation. I regard my early rising on that Monday morning as the beginning of my first real awakening to life as an Englishman. I had still far to go--I had not even crossed the threshold as yet.

XVII

ONE STEP FORWARD

Thy trust, thy honours, these were great; the greater now thy shame,
for thou hast proved both unready and unfit, unworthy offspring of a
noble sire!--MERROW'S _Country Tales_.

Five minutes after Clement Blaine reached the office of _The Mass_ that morning, he had lost the services of his assistant editor, and I felt that I had taken one step upward from a veritable quagmire of humiliation.

Blaine was almost too excited about the news of the day to pay much heed to my little speech of resignation. The morning paper to which he subscribed--a Radical journal of pronounced tone--had observed far less reticence than most of its contemporaries, and, in its desire to lend sensational interest to its columns, had not minimized in any way the startling character of such intelligence as it had received.

"The bloodthirsty German devils!" said Blaine, the erstwhile apostle of internationalism and the socialistic brotherhood of man. "By God, the Admiralty and the War Office ought to swing for this! Here are we taxed out of house and home to support their wretched armies and navies, and German soldiers marching on London, they say, with never a sign of a hand raised to oppose 'em--damn them! Nice time you choose to talk of leaving. By God, Mordan, you may be leaving from against a wall with a bullet through your head, next thing you know. These German devils don't wear kid gloves, I fancy. They're not like our tin-pot army. Army!--we haven't got one--lot of gold-laced puppets!"

That was how Clement Blaine was moved by the news. Last week: "Bloated armaments," "huge battalions of idle men eating the heart out of the nation through its revenues." This week, we had no army, and because of it the Admiralty and the War Office ought to "swing." In Blaine's ravings I had my foretaste of public opinion on the crisis.

On the previous day I had listened to a prominent Member of Parliament urging that our children should be preserved from the contamination of contact with those who taught the practice of the "hellish art" of shooting.

The leading daily papers of this Monday morning admitted the central fact that England had been invaded during Saturday night, and even allowed readers to assume that portions of the eastern counties were then occupied by "foreign" troops. But they used the word "raid" in place of "invasion," and generally qualified it with such a word as "futile." The general tone was that a Power with whom we had believed ourselves to be upon friendly terms had been guilty of rash and provocative action toward us, which it would speedily be made to regret. It was an insult, which would be promptly avenged; full atonement for which would be demanded and obtained at once. It was even suggested that some tragic misunderstanding would be found to lie at the root of the whole business; and in any case, things were to be set right without delay. One journal, the _Standard_, did go so far as to say that the British public was likely to be forced now into learning at great cost a lesson which had been offered daily as a free gift since the opening of the century, and as steadily repudiated or ignored.

"Two things it should teach England," said this journal; "never to invite insult and contempt by a repetition of Sunday's Disarmament Demonstration or enunciation of its fallacious and dangerous teaching; and the necessity for paying instant heed to the warnings of the advocates of universal military training for purposes of home defence."

But at that time the nicknames of the "The Imperialist Banner" and "The Patriotic Pulpit," applied by various writers and others to this great newspaper, were scornful names, applied with opprobrious intent; and London was still full of people whose only comment upon this sufficiently badly-needed warning would be: "Oh, of course, the _Standard_!"

But the policy of reticence, though I have no doubt that it did save London from some terrible scenes of panic, was not to be tenable for many hours. Within half an hour of noon special editions of a halfpenny morning paper, and an evening paper belonging to the same proprietors, were issued simultaneously with a full, sensational, and quite unreserved statement of all the news obtainable from East Anglia. A number of motor-cyclists had been employed in the quest of intelligence, and one item of the news they had to tell was that Colchester had offered resistance to the invaders, and as a result had been shelled and burned to the ground. A number of volunteers and other civilians had been found bearing arms, and had been tried by drum-head court martial and shot within the hour, by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces.

Another sensational item was a copy of a proclamation issued by the German Commander-in-Chief. This proclamation was dated from Ipswich, and I think it struck more terror into the people than any other single item of intelligence published during that eventful day. It was headed with the Imperial German Arms, and announced the establishment of German military jurisdiction in England. It announced that the penalty of immediate death would be inflicted without any exception upon any British subject not wearing and being entitled to wear British military uniform who should be found:

1. Taking arms against the invaders.

2. Misleading German troops.

3. Injuring in any manner whatever any German subject.

4. Injuring any road, rail, or waterway, or means of communication.

5. Offering resistance of any kind whatsoever to the advance and occupation of the German Army.

Then followed peremptory details of instructions as to the supplies which every householder must furnish for the German soldiers quartered in his neighbourhood, and an announcement as to the supreme and inviolable authority of the German officer in command of any given place.

Nothing else yet published brought home to the public the realization of what had happened as did this coldly pompous and, in the circumstances, very brutal proclamation. And no item in it so bit into the hearts of the bewildered Londoners who read it as did the clear incisive statement to the effect that a British subject who wore no military uniform would be shot like a dog if he raised a hand in the defence of his country or his home. He must receive the invader with open arms, and provide him food, lodging, and assistance of every kind, or be led out and shot. There were hundreds of thousands of men in London that day who would have given very much for the right to wear a uniform which they had learned almost to despise of late years; a uniform many of them had wished to abolish altogether, as the badge of a primitive and barbarous trade, a "hellish art."

We had talked glibly enough of war, of its impossibility in England, and of the childish savagery of the appeal to arms; just as, a few years earlier, before the naval reductions, we had talked of England's inviolability, secured her by her unquestioned mastery of the sea. We had written and spoken hundreds of thousands of fine words upon these subjects; and, within the last forty-eight hours, we had demonstrated with great energy the needlessness of armed forces for England. For and against, about it and about, we had woven a mazy network of windy platitudes and catch-phrases, all devised to hide the manifest and manly duties of citizenship; all intended to justify the individual's exclusive concentration upon his own personal pleasures and aggrandizement, without waste of time or energy upon any claims of the commonwealth.

And now, in a few score of short, sharp words, in a single brief document, peremptorily addressed to the fifty million people of these islands, a German soldier had brought an end to all our vapourings, all our smug, self-interested theories, and shattered the monstrous fabric of our complaisance, as it were, with a rattle of his sword-hilt. Never before in history had a people's vanity been so shaken by a word.

In the early afternoon an unavoidable errand took me to a northeastern suburb. I made my return to town as one among an army of refugees. The people had begun flocking into London from as far north and east as Brentwood. The Great Eastern Railway was disorganized. The northern highways leading into London were occupied by unbroken lines of people journeying into the city for protection--afoot, in motor-cars, on cycles, and in every kind of horse-drawn vehicle, and carrying with them the strangest assortment of personal belongings.

At the earliest possible hour I made my way toward South Kensington. I told myself there might be something I could do for Constance Grey. Beyond that there was the fact that I craved another sight of her, and I longed to hear her comment when she knew I had finished with _The Mass_.

A porter on the Underground Railway told me that the Southwestern and Great Western termini were blocked by feverish crowds of well-to-do people, struggling, with their children, for places in trains bound south and west. Huge motor-cars of the more luxurious type whizzed past one in the street continuously, their canopies piled high with bags, their bodies full of women and children, their chauffeurs driving hard toward the southern and western highways.

Outside South Kensington station I had my first sight of a Royal Proclamation upon the subject of the invasion. Evidently the Government realized that, prepared or unprepared, the state of affairs could no longer be hidden from the public. The King was at Buckingham Palace that day I knew, and it seemed to me that I read rather his Majesty's own sentiments than those of his Cabinet in the Proclamation. I gathered that the general public also formed this impression.

There is no need for me to reproduce a document which forms part of our history. The King's famous reference to the Government--"The Destroyers"--"Though admittedly unprepared for such a blow, my Government is taking prompt steps for coping in a decisive manner," etc.; and again, the equally famous reference to the German Emperor, in the sentence beginning: "This extraordinary attack by the armed forces of my Royal and Imperial nephew." These features of a nobly dignified and restrained Address seemed to me to be a really direct communication from their Sovereign to the English people. Whatever might be said of the position of "The Destroyers" in Whitehall, it became evident, even at this early stage, that the Throne was in no danger--that the sanctity pertaining to the person of the Monarch who, as it were in despite of his Government, had done more for the true cause of peace than any other in Europe, remained inviolate in the hearts of the people.

For the rest, the Proclamation was a brief, simple statement of the facts, with an equally simple but very heart-stirring appeal to every subject of the Crown to concentrate his whole energies, under proper guidance, upon the task of repelling "this dastardly and entirely unprovoked attack upon our beloved country."

I heard many deeply significant and interesting comments from the circle of men and women who were reading this copy of the Proclamation. The remarks of two men I repeat here because in both cases they were typical and representative. The first remark was from a man dressed as a navvy, with a short clay pipe in his mouth. He said:

"Oh, yus; the King's all right; Gawd bless un! No one 'ld mind fightin' for 'im. It's 'is blighted Gov'nment wot's all bloomin' wrong--blast 'em!"

The reply came from a young man evidently of sedentary occupation--a shop-assistant or clerk:

"You're all right, too, old sport; but don't you forget the other feller's proclamation. If you 'aven't got no uniform, your number's up for lead pills, an' don't you forget it. A fair fight an' no favour's all right; but I'm not on in this blooming execution act, thank you. Edward R. I. will have to pass me, I can see."

"Well, 'e won't lose much, matey, when all's said. But you're English, anyway; that seems a pity. Why don't yer run 'ome ter yer ma, eh?"

"Go it, old sport. You're a blue-blooded Tory; an Imperialist, aren't you?"

"Not me, boy; I'm only an able-bodied man."

"What ho! Got a flag in your pocket, have you? You watch the Germans don't catch you fer sausage meat."

And then I passed on, heading for Constance Grey's flat. I reflected that I had done my share toward forming the opinions, the mental attitude of that young clerk or shop-assistant. The type was familiar enough. But I had had no part nor lot in the preservation of that navvy's simple patriotism. Rather, by a good deal, had the tendency of all I said and wrote been toward weakening the sturdy growth, and causing it to be deprecated as a thing archaic, an obstacle in the way of progress.

Progress! The expounding of Herr Mitmann of Stettin! That Monday was a minor day of judgment for others beside myself.

XVIII

THE DEAR LOAF

A third of the people, then, in the event of war, would immediately
be reduced to starvation: and the rest of the thirty-eight million
would speedily be forced thither.--L. COPE CORNFORD'S _The
Defenceless Islands_ (London, 1906).

I saw Constance Grey only for a few minutes during that day. She had passed the stage of shocked sorrow and sad fear in which I had found her on Sunday, and was exceedingly busy in organizing a corps of assistant nurses, women who had had some training, and were able to provide a practical outfit of nursing requisites. She had the countenance of the Army Medical authorities, but her nursing corps was to consist exclusively of volunteers.

The organizing ability this girl displayed was extraordinary. She spared five minutes for conversation, and warmed my heart with her appreciation of my severance of _The Mass_ connection. And then, before I knew what had happened, she had me impressed, willingly enough, in her service, and I was off upon an errand connected with the volunteer nursing corps. News had arrived of some wounded refugees in Romford, unable to proceed on their way into London; and a couple of motor-cars, with nurses and medical comforts, were despatched at once.

Detailed news of the sacking of Colchester showed this to have been a most extraordinarily brutal affair for the work of a civilized army. The British regular troops at Colchester represented the whole of our forces of the northeastern division, and included three batteries of artillery. The regiments of this division had been reduced to three, and for eighteen months or more these had been mere skeletons of regiments, the bulk of the men being utilized to fill other gaps caused by the consistently followed policy of reduction which had characterized "The Destroyers'" regime.

A German spy who had been captured in Romford and brought to London, said that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England had publicly announced to his men that the instructions received from their Imperial master were that the pride of the British people must be struck down to the dust; that the first blows must be crushing; that the British people were to be smitten with terror from which recovery should be impossible.

Be this as it may, the sacking of Colchester was a terrible business. A number of citizens had joined the shockingly small body of regulars in a gallant attempt at defence. The attempt was quite hopeless; the German superiority in numbers, discipline, metal, and material being quite overwhelming. But the German commander was greatly angered by the resistance offered, and, as soon as he ascertained that civilians had taken part in this, the town was first shelled and then stormed. It was surrounded by a cordon of cavalry, and--_no prisoners were taken_.

The town was burned to the ground, though many valuable stores were first removed from it; and those of the inhabitants who had not already fled were literally mown down in their native streets, without parley or quarter--men, women, and children being alike regarded as offenders against the edict forbidding any civilian British subject, upon pain of death, to offer any form of resistance to German troops. I myself spoke to a man in Knightsbridge that evening who had definite news that his nineteen-year-old daughter, a governess in the house of a Colchester doctor, was among those shot down in the streets of the town while endeavouring to make her escape with two children. The handful of British regulars had been shot or cut to pieces, and the barracks and stores taken over by the Germans.

As I left Constance Grey's flat that evening I passed a small baker's shop, before which an angry crowd was engaged in terrifying a small boy in a white apron, who was nervously endeavouring to put up the window shutters. I asked what the trouble was, and was told the baker had refused to sell his half-quartern loaves under sevenpence, or his quartern loaves under a shilling.

"It's agin the law, so it is," shouted an angry woman. "I'm a policeman's wife, an' I know what I'm talking about. I'll have the law of the nasty mean hound, so I will, with his shillin' for a fivepenny loaf, indeed!"

Long before this time, and while Britain still held on to a good proportion of her foreign trade, it had been estimated by statisticians that in the United Kingdom some ten to twelve million persons lived always upon the verge of hunger. But since then the manufacturers of protected countries, notably Germany and the United States, had, as was inevitable in the face of our childish clinging to what we miscalled "free" trade, crowded the British manufacturer out of practically every market in the world, except those of Canada. Those also must of necessity have been lost, but for the forbearing and enduring loyalty of the Canadian people, who, in spite of persistent rebuffs, continued to extend and to increase their fiscal preference for imports from the Mother-country.

But, immense as Canada's growth was even then, no one country could keep the manufacturers of Britain busy; and I believe I am right in saying that at this time the number of those who lived always on the verge of hunger had increased to at least fifteen millions. Cases innumerable there were in which manufacturers themselves had gone to swell the ranks of the unemployed and insufficiently employed; the monstrous legion of those who lived always close to the terrifying spectre of hunger.

If the spirit of Richard Cobden walked the earth at that time, even as his obsessions assuredly still cumbered it, it must have found food for bitter reflection in the hundreds of empty factories, grass-grown courtyards, and broken-windowed warehouses, which a single day's walk would show one in the north of England.

You may be sure I thought of those things as I walked away from that baker's shop in South Kensington. A journalist, even though he be only the assistant of a man like Blaine, is apt to see the conditions of life in his country fairly plainly, because he has a wider vision of them than most men. Into Fleet Street, each day brings an endless stream of "news items," not only from all parts of the world, but from every town and city in the kingdom. And your journalist, though he may have scant leisure for its digestion, absorbs the whole of this mass of intelligence each day in the process of conveying one-tenth part of it, in tabloid form, to the public.