"Feby. 8/1914."
The only way I can account for my aunt's love of exclamation-marks was her delight at seeing a sentence round to a good finish. I have known authors to be so overcome with the dramatic significance of their work that they put them in as a sort of public recognition thereof.
En passant…. I wonder why my aunt never wrote a serial story for one of the London dailies.
IX
War.
Our world of artificiality lay like a cracked eggshell. As drowning men, we clutched at everything that seemed stable … to find nothing that was not made of perishable stuff. Our pens that had criticized so long mocked us as we gazed at the pages which seemed to reject our thoughts before we gave them life. A few of us turned into special war writers and comforted the nation with statistics. We showed that Germany was beaten—it was a mathematical truth that could be proved. While we demonstrated our immense superiority to the enemy in figures, a little British Army was fighting against odds of six to one.
And the Fates stood by with poised shears, ready to cut the thread of Britain's destiny.
It is not pleasant to recall the arraignment of the year 1914. The Boer War had shown our weakness to every nation but ourselves; our educated men had graduated into the world using their abilities as obstructionists. We had discouraged everything that had the very odor of progress.
Yet—we muddled through. Men still use that word as if it were something creditable instead of hideous. We won, because, behind the Britain that muddled and obstructed, there was the Britain of noble mothers and noble sons.
And into the first winter our orgy of statistics went on, like an endless Babylonian feast … while the British fleet—which we should never need—strained and plunged in the icy gales of the North Sea, grimly, silently, saving the world for Civilization.