One wild night began when the policeman on point duty in Piccadilly Circus thought that the last revelers had gone home in the last taxis, but he was a surprised man when life seemed to waken up again and there was the swish of motor cars through the circus and bands of young men walking in evening dress, not, apparently, on their way to bed, but just beginning some new adventure. They advanced upon the Grafton Galleries singing a little ballad that marks the date:
“Hullo, hullo, hullo!
It’s a different girl again!
Different hair, different clothes,
Different eyes, different nose....”
This affair had been kept a dead secret from press and public. It was a “glorious stunt” which had for its amiable object the introduction of all the prettiest girls of the theater world to all the smartest bloods of the universities and clubs. It was entitled the Butterfly Ball.
Certainly there were some astoundingly beautiful girls at this assembly, and not a few of them. The university boys were, for a time abashed by so much loveliness. But they brightened up, especially when the most famous sporting peer of England—Lord Lonsdale—led off the dance with a little girl dressed, rather naughtily, as a teetotum. By the time I left—a kind of Pierrot looking on at the gayety of life—there was a terrific battle in progress between groups of boys and girls, with little white rolls of bread as their ammunition. Not commendable. Not strictly virtuous, nor highly proper, but in its wildness there was the spirit of a youth which, afterward, was heroic in self-sacrifice.... So things happened in London before the war.
A series of articles appearing in The Daily Mail, by Robert Blatchford, once a Socialist and still on the democratic side of political life, disturbed the sense of security in the average mind by a slight uneasiness. Not more than that, because the average mind had its inherited faith in our island inviolability and the power of the British Navy. There were articles entitled “Am Tag,” which is bad German, and they professed to reveal a determination in the military and naval castes of Germany to destroy the British fleet, invade England, and smash the British Empire.
Some of the evidence brought forward seemed childish in its absurdity. There were not many facts to a wealth of rhetoric. But they created a newspaper sensation, and were pooh-poohed by the government, as we now know, with utter insincerity—for there were members of that government who knew far more than Blatchford how deep and widespread was German hostility to Great Britain, and how close Europe stood to a world war.
One fantastic little incident connected with those articles of Blatchford’s amused me considerably at the time, though afterward I thought of it as a strange prophecy.