In July of [1914] I was a stranger in a strange city and particularly out of touch with the world’s politics. Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that particular atmosphere-less, perspective-lessness of the daily papers which somehow for a man with some historic sense robs them of all real interest. I don’t think I had looked at a daily for a month past.
But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there with me out of pure kindness, to bear me company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.
It was this friend who one morning at breakfast informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.
The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed. I remembered only that not long before he had visited London, but that memory was lost in a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked. Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance had been archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an archduke? And now he was no more, and with a certain atrocity of circumstance which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. I knew nothing of his journey. I did not connect that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations. I asked where it had happened. My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences of that grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.
It was with perfect sincerity that I said “Nothing,” and I dismissed the subject, having a great repugnance to consider murder as an engine of politics. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy archdukes in the background out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the sun of European politics. And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgement who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was fixed on my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating, holiday promising aspect. I obtained my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now and then to see us with their pockets full of crumpled papers, and who imparted it to me casually with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one’s attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the powers of the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility while watching the collective Europe stage managing a little contemptuously in a feeling of conscious superiority, by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit, same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air: race, liberation, justice, and the same mood of trivial demonstration. You could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg, however roundabout the route. “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking-clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some “café turc” at the end of his lunch.
—“Monsieur veut dire café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.
I will not say that I had not seen something of that instructive aspect in the war of the Balkans, both in its first and even in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of an alarmist cynicism. As to alarm I pointed out that fear is natural to man and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must be carried off by a jaunty bearing—a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought to be a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It had been pointed out to me that those were nations not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding pigs. The complex material civilization of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by war. The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of the idle class or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.
Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been even a book written on that theme—an attempt to put pacifism on a material basis. Nothing more solid could have been imagined on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was bad business! This was final.
But truth to say on this fateful July I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire to notice the signs, or to interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions takes the edge off one’s judgement. The desire which obsessed me was simply the desire of travel. And that being so, it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future—the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession, the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.
In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow but on the other side of the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first seemed to be considerable. Since leaving the sea to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess it with shame, my first idea about a projected journey is to leave it alone.