Not even the formal declaration of war on Servia, made by Austria on the Tuesday following that fateful Friday, arrested the effort of the British Government to avert the catastrophe.
Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall, the German demand was made for British neutrality and the first shots were fired at Belgrade.
Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the Mittel-Europa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."
Napier flung the letters into the waste-paper basket and forgot them. But as he went about his work, transmitting cryptic telephone calls or hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.
Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then the moment when France cried, "Yes," and Germany's silence was louder in the instructed ear than roar of cannon.
Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing more could be hoped for or immediately be done, he found that, for the first time in his life, he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if only for a single round of the clock.
They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged. The fact struck sharply on the strained senses of the two men who drove up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful August. Late Saturday night Germany had declared war on Russia, and France was already invaded.
In the hall at Kirklamont Lady McIntyre sat with her family, her Russian embroidery, and her boarhounds. She came to meet her husband with, "William, dear! And what's the news?"
Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the point of going upstairs, changed his mind.
Sir William met interrogation testily.