And then came the crushing disaster of the Lusitania. A wave of horror and rage swept over the country. Till now, Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate" had aroused ridicule, not resentment, amongst English-speaking peoples. The Belgian atrocities, known in all their horror to very few, had been accepted as the handiwork of brutes driven mad by drink and blood-lust, not as the systematic, inspired doctrine of Frightfulness. But when all Germany rose up to justify the slaughter of helpless women and children, when streets were beflagged, medals struck, and the schools held holiday, the nation began, at last, to grasp the truth. Might meant to stick at nothing.
Recruiting, in the rural districts, received a sharp stimulus.
Fancy, lying awake at night, shed many tears, but none before Mrs. Yellam. The pair, so strangely different, got on well together, because, so Susan said, the girl was not a chatter-box. Often they would meet and part without exchanging more than a dozen words. Fancy would help with the work, the never-ending cleaning and sweeping, or take some sewing and sit by the kitchen fire in silence. These quiet ways endeared her more and more to Alfred's mother, and occasionally, very seldom, Fancy would be vouchsafed a glimpse of an indurated heart. She had noticed that Mrs. Yellam avoided any direct reference to the Deity, Whose name, before the war, had been so often on her lips, the personal God, Whose guiding finger, even in trivial, domestic affairs, could be so plainly seen. One day, on the eve of Alfred's departure for France, Fancy said nervously:
"God will be with Alfred."
Mrs. Yellam said quickly:
"He be wi' the Kayser, too, seemin'ly."
Instantly she closed her lips, as if fearful that more might leak from them. Fancy remained discreetly silent. She comforted herself with this reflection: faith in works sustained this unhappy old woman. She laboured abundantly for others at Pomfret Court, and tended her garden diligently so that she might have fruit and flowers and vegetables to bestow upon poorer neighbours. In church, her responses were clear and regular, her deportment irreproachable, but she never discussed the sermon, once a favourite mental exercise, and Fancy came to the conclusion that she no longer listened to it, too much obsessed by her own perplexities.
About this time Nether-Applewhite was electrified out of its apathy by an extraordinary event, something so unexpected that Hamlin himself, who had foreshadowed such a remote possibility in his sermon on Patriotism, began to wonder if he had been inspired.
George Mucklow won the Victoria Cross!
This heavy, stolid young man, who shut both eyes when his shins were imperilled by a cricket-ball, who was "afeard wi' maids," who had been driven to the colours before the toe of a thick boot, performed one of those deeds that thrill an Empire. Fortunately for him, the tremendous opportunity of which Hamlin had spoken came at a moment when Authority was looking on, and able to record what took place. George confessed afterwards that at the time he didn't know what he did, or how he did it. Out of some subconscious zone surged the irresistible impulse blindly obeyed. A shell fell in the trenches at a moment when the officer on duty was making his rounds. Not an "Archie" or a "Black Maria" but something smaller than a football. Dozens of men were close to it. George darted past the officer and hurled himself upon it.