III
An average group, assembling at Paddington, found the train service disorganised by a minor strike and whiled away its time of idleness enforced by exchanging news of the Buckingham Palace conference and of the menace to peace in south-eastern Europe. One of the party had been lunching with the Pilgrims and retailed a rumour that there had been a slight run on the Bank of England that morning; this was in the early days of rumours, and all listened respectfully, though it was difficult to see why English depositors should be alarmed at the Balkan imbroglio. Another of the party enlivened the journey by exhibiting new maps of Servia and south-east Austria, but, once away from the neurosis of London, no one was interested in anything but the threatened civil war in Ireland.
Any one who asked perfunctorily for news of Servia was assured that she would yield to superior force at the last moment. Though a journalist might whisper confidentially that the fleet had sailed from Portsmouth with coal stacked on deck, this was very far from making war unavoidable: if Servia refused to comply with the terms of the ultimatum, Russia would indeed come to her protection against Austria; but then Germany would come to the aid of Austria against Russia, while France would hasten to help Russia against Germany. The same automatic widening of the conflict had been threatened when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; but, as it was then recognised that one great power would bring in another, so it would be recognised now and prevented; as Great Britain could not face a European war for Bosnia, so she could not now face it for Servia.
Similar conversations were taking place at that hour in thousands of similar houses. Few of all who took part in these last meetings imagined that within a few days they would be training for commissions; no one dreamed that, before a year had passed, almost every man at all these tables would have entered the army, that some would be wounded, others already killed. To most, a general war only became conceivable two days later, when the Sunday newspapers reported that German troops had crossed the frontiers of France and Luxemburg.
Thereafter, more quickly than dazed minds could take in, the impossible became the actual. On Monday, though Kuhlmann's efforts to localise the conflict brought a moment's hope, letters and telegrams, flying from one part of the country to another, convinced even the most sanguine that war—in which Great Britain would be involved—was inevitable; and, before nightfall, every town and village was ringing with Sir Edward Grey's speech.
"How far that friendship entails ... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself...."
The thousands who had scattered four days earlier to every part of England poured back, on a common impulse, to London. There, all felt, they would gain readier news, perhaps better news, when the silence and isolation of the country had become unbearable. They assembled at hundreds of country stations, debating to the last whether the peace-trained navy would stand the test of war; and, as they read the morning papers, they found that the full text of the foreign secretary's speech made war a certainty, unless Germany submitted to a diplomatic rebuff more disastrously humiliating than the worst defeat in the field.
London that afternoon lay at the mercy of the first war-expositors. Those who had most vehemently attacked the 1909 ship-building programme now most loudly thanked God that England was an island protected by a strong fleet; a few railed against the earlier course of a foreign policy which had embroiled Great Britain in continental rivalries; no one at that time or in that place suggested that war could be averted. When the major issues had been discussed, confidences were exchanged about the ministers who had resigned and wobbled and withdrawn their resignations. Lord Morley and Mr. John Burns had left the cabinet, followed by a small number of minor office-holders; Lord Beauchamp and others, who had refused to support a war for which the sanction of the country had been neither obtained nor sought, renewed their allegiance to the government when the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain was bound by treaty to defend, was violated; but the champions of peace, who had vowed that British troops should only leave England over their dead bodies, and the opponents of intervention, who had explained to wavering colleagues that Great Britain was under no international obligation to take part, remained snugly if silently in office. The fleet, it was now heard, had been ordered to take up war-stations and to seal the German forces in port before the ultimatum was issued; the expeditionary force, it was also heard, had received at least preliminary mobilization-orders while war hung yet in the balance; and so quickly do moral standards decline when personal security is threatened that those who had attacked Germany for her too timely massing of troops congratulated themselves that in England also there were men of laudable vigilance and decision.
And, like punctuation-marks at the end of every sentence, came interruptions from men torn out of familiar surroundings and flung into a world whose very language they did not understand:
"They say there will be a run on the banks for gold ...," murmured one.