Sabre turned away. This frightful war....
CHAPTER VI
I
This frightful war! On his brain like a weight. On his heart like a pressing hand.
Came Christmas by which, at the outset, everybody knew it would be over, and it was not over. Came June, 1915, concerning which, at the outset, he had joined with Mr. Fortune, Twyning and Harold in laughter at his own grotesque idea of the war lasting to the dramatic effect of a culminating battle on the centenary of Waterloo, and the war had lasted, and was still lasting.
"This frightful war!" The words were constantly upon his lips, ejaculated to himself in reception of new manifestations of its eruptions; forever in his mind, like a live thing gnawing there. Other people seemed to suffer the war in spasms, isolated amidst the round of their customary routines, of dejection or of optimistic reassurance. The splendid sentiment of "Business as usual" was in many valiant mouths. The land, in so far as provisions and prices were concerned, continued to flow in milk and honey as the British Isles had always flowed in milk and honey. In July a rival multiple grocer's shop opened premises opposite the multiple grocer's shop already established in the shopping centre of the Garden Home and Mabel told Sabre how very exciting it was. The rivals piled their windows, one against the other, with stupendous stacks of margarine and cheese at sevenpence the pound each; and then one day, "Whatever do you think?" the new man interspersed his mountains of margarine and cheese with wooden bowls running over with bright new pennies, and flamed his windows with announcements that this was "The Money-back Shop." You bought a pound of margarine for sevenpence and were handed a penny with your purchase! And the next day, "Only fancy!" the other man also had bright new pennies (in bursting bags from the bank) and also bellowed that he too was a Money-back Shop.
"The fact is the war really hasn't mattered a bit," Mabel said. "I think it's wonderful. And when you remember at the beginning how people rushed to buy up food and what awful ideas of starvation went about; you were one of the worst."
And Sabre agreed that it really was wonderful: and agreed too with Mabel's further opinion that he really ought not to get so fearfully depressed.
But he remained fearfully depressed. The abundance of food, and such manifestations of plenty as the bowls and bags of bright new pennies meant nothing to him. He knew nothing about war. Very possibly the prophecies of shortage and restrictions and starvation were, in the proof, to be refuted as a thousand other prophecies of the early days, optimistic and pessimistic, were being refuted. What had that to do with it? Remained the frightful facts that were going on out there in Belgium and in Gallipoli and in Russia. Remained the increasing revelation of Germany's enormous might in war and the revelation of what war was as she conducted it. Remained the sinister revelation that we were not winning as in the past we had "always won." Remained his envisagement of England—England!—standing four-square to her enemies, but standing as some huge and splendid animal something bewildered by the fury of the onset upon it. Shaking her head whereon had fallen stunning and unexpected blows, as it might be a lion enormously smashed across the face; roaring her defiance; baring her fangs; tearing up the ground before her; dreadful and undaunted and tremendous; but stricken; in sore agony; in heavy amazement; her pride thrust through with swords; her glory answered by another's glory; her dominion challenged; shaken, bleeding.
England.... This frightful war!