We were, of course, far away in the physical sense; six miles away from the nearest village of any size, with a post only three times a week. We saw nobody who understood what was happening better than ourselves, and we read the newspaper when it came so little. Walter had always an aversion for newspapers, I never quite knew why, and I was so absorbed in Eleanor, and the new life with her, that the outer world seemed to have slipped right away, when we got into the train at Euston.
The stages in these weeks that one now knows were turning points in the catastrophe escaped us then with a completeness that seems amazing.
The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, when it came, meant nothing at all. I remember Walter reading it aloud at breakfast, in the farm parlour; even now the smell of hot coffee and bacon brings that morning back to me, which is odd, considering how little we realized its importance.
The paper had come the evening before, but we had not opened it. Walter liked a paper at breakfast, not at other times. He opened it and read it carelessly, not caring much what he found there. He said:
‘There seems to be a dustup in the Balkans after all, over that man being killed. Here is an Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia,’ and he read a few lines of it aloud.
‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? going on like that at this time of day. It seems to belong to the eighteenth century or perhaps the seventeenth.’
And I said:
‘I suppose they are a century or two behind us over there.’
And we did not bother about it any more. We went a long walk that day and came back rather tired, and hungry; and in the afternoon it rained, and we could not read our Gibbon out of doors, as we had meant to. I remember that we followed what happened in the newspaper with a certain interest; it gave one something to look for among the rather dull collection of Parliamentary Debates and Home affairs, but it was an impersonal interest.
I remember one day thinking about it, and being shocked with myself for minding it so little. That must have been some days later, when Russia and Germany seemed to be coming in. I went up on the hill behind the house, by myself, and sat down on the grass, and tried to realize what was happening. I remember trying to picture the Russian soldiers, and the Austrian soldiers, and to think what it meant; those hundreds and thousands of people leaving their homes, and going to fight.