Reversal to barbarism.
War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect, hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress—she the good mother, the housewife, the fond grandmother—garmented from head to foot in cloth the color of blood.
Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war.
II.
BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION.
There was war; and the whole machinery of civilization stopped.
Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all falls apart into muddle and ruin. The declaration of war was like thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped.
That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it was.
Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing. I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral State. I had money in a bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note. What had seemed money was not money.
Values were told in terms of bread.