Mr. Britling Sees It Through (25 page)

§ 13

After the jolt of the food panic and a brief financial scare, the vast inertia of everyday life in England asserted itself. When the public went to the banks for the new paper money, the banks tendered gold—apologetically. The supply of the new notes was very insufficient, and there was plenty of gold. After the first impression that a universal catastrophe had happened there was an effect as if nothing had happened.

Shops reopened after the Bank Holiday, in a tentative spirit that speedily became assurance; people went about their business again, and the war, so far as the mass of British folk were concerned, was for some weeks a fever of the mind and intelligence rather than a physical and personal actuality. There was a keen demand for news, and for a time there was very little news. The press did its best to cope with this immense occasion. Led by
The Daily Express
, all the halfpenny newspapers adopted a new and more resonant sort of headline, the streamer, a band of emphatic type that ran clean across the page and announced victories or disconcerting happenings. They did this every day, whether there was a great battle or
the loss of a trawler to announce, and the public mind speedily adapted itself to the new pitch.

There was no invitation from the government and no organisation for any general participation in war. People talked unrestrictedly; every one seemed to be talking; they waved flags and displayed much vague willingness to do something. Any opportunity of service was taken very eagerly. Lord Kitchener was understood to have demanded five hundred thousand men; the War Office arrangements for recruiting, arrangements conceived on a scale altogether too small, were speedily overwhelmed by a rush of willing young men. The flow had to be checked by raising the physical standard far above the national average, and recruiting died down to manageable proportions. There was a quite genuine belief that the war might easily be too exclusively considered; that for the great mass of people it was a disturbing and distracting rather than a vital interest. The phrase “Business as Usual” ran about the world, and the papers abounded in articles in which going on as though there was no war at all was demonstrated to be the truest form of patriotism. “Leave things to Kitchener” was another watchword with a strong appeal to the national quality. “Business as usual during Alterations to the Map of Europe” was the advertisement of one cheerful barber, widely quoted. …

Hugh was at home all through August. He had thrown up his rooms in London with his artistic ambitions, and his father was making all the necessary arrangements for him to follow Cardinal to Cambridge. Meanwhile Hugh was taking up his scientific work where he had laid it down. He gave a reluctant couple of hours in the afternoon to the mysteries of Little-go Greek, and for the rest of his time he was either working at mathematics and mathematical physics or experimenting in
a small upstairs room that had been carved out of the general space of the barn. It was only at the very end of August that it dawned upon him or Mr. Britling that the war might have more than a spectacular and sympathetic appeal for him. Hitherto contemporary history had happened without his personal intervention. He did not see why it should not continue to happen with the same detachment. The last elections—and a general election is really the only point at which the life of the reasonable Englishman becomes in any way public—had happened four years ago, when he was thirteen.

§ 14

For a time it was believed in Matching's Easy that the German armies had been defeated and very largely destroyed at Liège. It was a mistake not confined to Matching's Easy.

The first raiding attack was certainly repulsed with heavy losses, and so were the more systematic assaults on August the 6th and 7th. After that the news from Liège became uncertain, but it was believed in England that some or all of the forts were still holding out right up to the German entry into Brussels. Meanwhile the French were pushing into their lost provinces, occupying Altkirch, Malhausen and Saarburg; the Russians were invading Bukovina and East Prussia; the
Goeben
, the
Breslau
and the
Panther
had been sunk by the newspapers in an imaginary battle in the Mediterranean, and Togoland was captured by the French and British. Neither the force nor the magnitude of the German attack through Belgium was appreciated by the general mind, and it was possible for Mr. Britling to reiterate his fear that the war would be over too soon, long before the full measure of its possible benefits could be secured. But these apprehensions
were unfounded; the lessons the war had in store for Mr. Britling were fare more drastic than anything he was yet able to imagine even in his most exalted moods.

He resisted the intimations of the fall of Brussels and the appearance of the Germans at Dinant. The first real check to his excessive anticipations of victory for the Allies came with the sudden reappearance of Mr. Direck in a state of astonishment and dismay at Matching's Easy. He wired from the Strand office, “Coming to tell you about things,” and arrived on the heels of his telegram.

He professed to be calling upon Mr. and Mrs. Britling, and to a certain extent he was; but he had a quick eye for the door or windows; his glance roved irrelevantly as he talked. A faint expectation of Cissie came in with him and hovered about him, as the scent of violets follows the flower.

He was, however, able to say quite a number of things before Mr. Britling's natural tendency to do the telling asserted itself.

“My word,” said Mr. Direck, “but this is
some
war. It is going on regardless of every decent consideration. As an American citizen I naturally expected to be treated with some respect, war or no war. That expectation has not yet been realised. … Europe is dislocated. … You have no idea here yet how completely Europe is dislocated. …

“I came to Europe in a perfectly friendly spirit—and I must say I am surprised. Practically I have been thrown out, neck and crop. All my luggage is lost. Away at some one-horse junction near the Dutch frontier that I can't even learn the name of. There's joy in some German home, I guess, over my shirts; they were real good shirts. This tweed suit I have is all the wardrobe I've got in the world. All my money—good American notes— well, they laughed at them. And when I produced English gold
they suspected me of being English and put me under arrest … I can assure you that the English are most unpopular in Germany at the present time, thoroughly unpopular. … Considering that they are getting exactly what they were asking for, these Germans are really remarkably annoyed. … Well, I had to get the American consul to advance me money, and I've done more waiting about and irregular fasting and travelling on an empty stomach and viewing the world, so far as it was permitted, from railway sidings—for usually they made us pull the blinds down when anything important was on the track—than any cow that ever came to Chicago. … I was handled as freight—low-grade freight. … It doesn't bear recalling.”

Mr. Direck assumed as grave and gloomy an expression as the facial habits of years would permit.

“I tell you I never knew there was such a thing as war until this happened to me. In America we don't know there is such a thing. It's like pestilence and famine; something in the storybooks. We've forgotten it for anything real. There's just a few grandfathers go around talking about it. Judge Holmes and sage old fellows like him. Otherwise it's just a game the kids play at. … And then suddenly here's everybody running about in the streets—hating and threatening—and nice old gentlemen with white moustaches and fathers of families scheming and planning to burn houses and kill and hurt and terrify. And nice young women, too, looking for an Englishman to spit at; I tell you I've been within range and very uncomfortable several times. … And what one can't believe is that they are really doing these things. There's a little village called Visé near the Dutch frontier; some old chap got fooling there with a fowling-piece; and they've wiped it out. Shot the people by the dozen, put them out in rows three deep and shot them, and burned the
place. Short of scalping, Red Indians couldn't have done worse. Respectable German soldiers. …

“No one in England really seems to have any suspicion what is going on in Belgium. You hear stories——People tell them in Holland. It takes your breath away. They have set out just to cow those Belgians. They have started in to be deliberately frightful. You do not begin to understand. … Well. … Outrages. The sort of outrages Americans have never heard of. That one doesn't speak of. … Well. … Rape. … They have been raping women for disciplinary purposes on tables in the marketplace of Liège. Yes, sir. It's a fact. I was told it by a man who had just come out of Belgium. Knew the people, knew the place, knew everything. People over here do not seem to realise that those women are the same sort of women that you might find in Chester or Yarmouth, or in Matching's Easy for the matter of that. They still seem to think that Continental women are a different sort of women—more amenable to that sort of treatment. They seem to think there is some special Providential law against such things happening to English people. And it's within two hundred miles of you—even now. And as far as I can see there's precious little to prevent it coming nearer. …”

Mr. Britling thought there were a few little obstacles.

“I've seen the new British army drilling in London, Mr. Britling. I don't know if you have. I saw a whole battalion. And they hadn't got half-a-dozen uniforms, and not a single rifle to the whole battalion.

“You don't begin to realise in England what you are up against. You have no idea what it means to be in a country where everybody, the women, the elderly people, the steady middle-aged men, are taking war as seriously as business. They haven't the slightest compunction. I don't know what Germany was like
before the war, I had hardly gotten out of my train before the war began; but Germany today is one big armed camp. It's all crawling with soldiers. And every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his kit.

“And they're as sure of winning as if they had got London now. They mean to get London. They're cockshure they are going to walk through Belgium, cocksure they will get to Paris by Sedan day, and then they are going to destroy your fleet with Zeppelins and submarines and made a dash across the Channel. They say it's England they are after, in this invasion of Belgium. They'll just down France by the way. They say they've got guns to bombard Dover from Calais. They make a boast of it. They know for certain you can't arm your troops. They know you can't turn out ten thousand rifles a week. They come and talk to any one in the trains, and explain just how your defeat is going to be managed. It's just as though they were talking of rounding up cattle.”

Mr. Britling said they would soon be disillusioned.

Mr. Direck, with the confidence of his authentic observations, remarked after a perceptible interval, “I wonder how.”

He reverted to the fact that had most struck upon his imagination.

“Grown-up people, ordinary intelligent experienced people taking war seriously, talking of punishing England; it's a revelation. A sort of solemn enthusiasm. High and low. …

“And the train-loads of men and the train-loads of guns. …”

“Liège,” said Mr. Britling.

“Liège was just a scratch on the paint,” said Mr. Direck. “A few thousand dead, a few score thousand dead, doesn't matter— not a red cent. to them. There's a man arrived at the Cecil who saw them marching into Brussels. He sat at table with me at
lunch yesterday. All day it went on, a vast unending river of men in grey. Endless wagons, endless guns, the whole manhood of a nation and all its stuff, marching. …

“I thought war,” said Mr. Direck, “was a thing where most people stood about and did the shouting, and a sort of special team did the fighting. Well, Germany isn't fighting like that. … I confess it, I'm scared. … It's the very biggest thing on record; it's the very limit in wars. … I dreamt last night of a grey flood washing everything in front of it. You and me—and Miss Corner—curious thing, isn't it? that she came into it—were scrambling up a hill higher and higher, with that flood pouring after us. Sort of splashing into a foam of faces and helmets and bayonets—and clutching hands—and red stuff. … Well, Mr. Britling, I admit I'm a little bit over-wrought about it, but I can assure you you don't begin to realise in England what it is you've butted against. …”

§ 15

Cissie did not come up to the Dower House that afternoon, and so Mr. Direck, after some vague and transparent excuses, made his way to the cottage.

Here his report became even more impressive. Teddy sat on the writing-desk beside the typewriter and swung his legs slowly. Letty brooded in the arm-chair. Cissie presided over certain limited crawling operations of the young heir.

“They could have the equal of the whole British army killed three times over and scarcely know it had happened. They're
all
in it. It's a whole country in arms.”

Teddy nodded thoughtfully.

“There's our fleet,” said Letty.

“Well,
that
won't save Paris, will it?”

Mr. Direck didn't, he declared, want to make disagreeable talk, but this was a thing people in England had to face. He felt like one of them himself—“naturally.” He'd sort of hurried home to them—it was just like hurrying home—to tell them of the tremendous thing that was going to hit them. He felt like a man in front of a flood, a great grey flood. He couldn't hide what he had been thinking. “Where's our army?” asked Letty suddenly.

“Lost somewhere in France,” said Teddy. “Like a needle in a bottle of hay.”

“What I keep on worrying at is this,” Mr. Direck resumed. “Suppose they did come, suppose somehow they scrambled over, sixty or seventy thousand men perhaps.”