Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one might follow Majesty, with a great muster of Naval sea-planes and aëroplanes manoeuvring somewhat wildly overhead.
As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him, those lights he had spoken of were burning behind closely-curtained windows at the Admiralty and at the Foreign Office, and at the Belgian and German Embassies. In Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels and Paris and St. Petersburg—later to cast off its Teutonic name in loathing and be Petrograd—similar phenomena might have been observed. "Austria was going to take some step," as Prince Lichnowsky had nervously stated to Britain's Foreign Secretary, adding that he regarded the situation as very uncomfortable. And the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously confided to the British Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin that it was the intention of Austria-Hungary to offer Serbia a pill which she could not swallow, in the Note demanding the removal of all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy, presented by Baron Giesel at Belgrade, on the 24th of July. The ultimatum was to be accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping proviso, in which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch.
The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon. Men even then were doubtful as to the issue. It might yet, some said, be Peace. But if Man, who arrives at conclusions by intellectual processes, was unsure, not so things that are guided merely by Instinct. Like the wise creatures of Natal and the Transvaal and Bechuanaland in 1900, these knew quite well that War was in the air.
It is on record that in these days preceding the Great Calamity, huge droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and small bands of the rarer elk, with bears, hares, martens, and foxes, evacuated the forests of Bavaria and South Germany for the mountain fastnesses of Switzerland. Immense flights of birds not usually migratory, partridges, pheasants, grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl went South with the animals. Under cover of night the colossal game-preserves of East Prussia emptied into Poland—their furred and feathered peoples passing into the labyrinthine swamps of the Russian Dnieper and Dniester—spreading the news, sending the alarm before them:
"Man is coming, and with him War!"
Man was coming. That strange trembling of the earth had warned its creatures, even before the tramp, tramp, tramp of millions of marching feet, the rumbling that betokened the slow but sure approach of Titanic death-engines, told Fine Ears to seek safety in flight, before the cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel, and chemicals a thousand times more deadly, rolled down to overwhelm, and destroy. Hence through those July nights the sound of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads, and trotting hoofs, and heavy bodies crashing through sedge and brake and underbrush, hardly for a moment ceased. Puffs of sweet wild breath, and musky odours from hidden lairs; tufts of hair upon the thorns, and crowded spoor upon the dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the river-banks, told of their going, to those who were skilled to read such signs. But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight, bade the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven and owl and crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the table of Earth would shortly be spread for them as never before in the whole History of War. And their hoarse croaking and hooting and baying and barking answered: War, War, War!
CHAPTER XLIV
PATRINE REMEMBERS
Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had boasted—and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.
She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.