On our way up we read the full text of the previous day's speeches. They added little to our knowledge, but the sensationalism of all Fleet Street could hardly smear the bold outline of the Commons' scene. As well as if I had been there, I could visualize the haggard faces on the Treasury Bench as the Foreign Secretary expounded a situation that momentarily changed and acquired new complexity. I could almost see him phrasing his speech as he hurried to the House and discarding sentence after sentence as an eleventh-hour dispatch was handed him to read on the way. The speech itself breathed an air of fever, like the news of the Indian floods in 1903, when at one end of the line I read scraps of a message transmitted from a station that was swept away before the end. I knew something, too, of my House of Commons and its glorious uncertainty; to some extent I could guess at the feelings of a man who called for its decision in an unexpected war.
On reaching Paddington I sent my luggage to Princes Gardens and drove to the Club for luncheon. The extended Bank Holiday gave the streets an unfamiliar aspect, like an industrial town at the beginning of a lock-out. My driver took me round through Cockspur Street, and I found the White Star offices thronged with Americans newly mindful of the Monroe Doctrine. They pressed forward in a vociferous queue and, as the first arrivals fought their way back into the street, they could have sold their passage tickets ten times over at their own price.
In a block by the Crimean Monument I heard my name called, and Summertown passed with a hurried wave of the hand. I had seen him in mess uniform a dozen times when dining with the King's Guard; this was the first occasion on which I had met him dressed for active service. It was also the last time I saw him alive. All the way down Pall Mall I saw unfamiliar khaki on men I had never regarded as soldiers, and, as I mounted the steps of the Club, Tom Dainton ran down and engaged my vacant taxi, only pausing to murmur in his deep voice:
"Bore about this war, isn't it? I'd arranged to take my wife to Scotland."
The Club itself was reconciled to the inevitable, and the members forestalled the Government by some hours in issuing their ultimatum. I heard such names as 'Wilhelmshaven,' 'The Sound' and 'Kiel' being flung about with age-long familiarity by some, while others turned furtively to an atlas or inquired angrily why no geography was taught in the public schools. A group of barristers, flannel-suited for the Long Vacation, stood in one corner prophesying a shortage of food; and before long Crabtree, whom I had not seen half a dozen times in as many years, detached himself and cashed a cheque in the dining-room to the limit set by the Club rules. More than one father of a family, following his example, wrote unpractical grocery orders or dispatched tinned tongues to helpless dependents in the country. From food shortage to bread riots was a short step, and I overheard a circle of Civil Servants discussing the early enrolment of special constables.
The long 'Parliamentary' table in the dining-room was in a condition of crowded excitement, and each new-comer brought a fresh list of the Ministers who had resigned and the reasons for which they had wobbled back into the fold. Nowhere did I hear it suggested that war was avoidable, hardly anywhere that it should be avoided, though two Radical members who had consistently voted against the increased naval estimates in 1909 declaimed against the dispatch of land forces and asserted that all must be left to a happily invincible Fleet.
In the first year of the war I often marvelled at the uncritical credulity of educated men who believed and handed on every rumour or theory of the moment—from the execution of Admirals in the Tower to the certain arrival of Cossacks in Berlin by Christmas. I lay no claim to superior wisdom, as for six months I myself believed all such stories as simply as I afterwards rejected true with false. From the day of the ultimatum there was a ready disposition to canvass opinions without considering their worth, and before the end of luncheon I was ladling out second-hand judgements on the French cavalry or on reputed defects of meeting recoil as observed in the practice of German field artillery. Had I not been absent from the Club for nearly a week? Must I not be presumed to have new information or fresh points of view?
As I paid my bill, Jellaby hurried up with the suggestion that I should report next day at the Admiralty.
"Is war quite certain?" I asked.
"As certain as anything in an uncertain world," he answered.