only interned.
Back we went to Sydney. A great change had come since our departure.
The war ruled all deed and thought. Australia was bound now to do her
part. No less faithfully and splendidly than New Zealand was she
engaged upon the enterprise the Hun had thrust upon the world.
Everyone was eager for news, but it was woefully scarce. Those were
the black, early days, when the German rush upon Paris was being
stayed, after the disasters of the first fortnight of the war, at the Marne.
Everywhere, though there was no lack of determination to see the war
through to a finish, no matter how remote that might be, the feeling was
that this war was too huge, too vast, to last long. Exhaustion would end
it. War upon the modern scale could not last. So they said --in
September, 1914! So many of us believed--and this is the spring of the
fourth year of the war, and the end is not yet, is not in sight, I fear.
Sydney turned out, almost as magnificently as when I had first landed
upon Australian soil, to bid me farewell. And we embarked again upon
that same old Sonoma that had brought us to Australia. Again I saw
Paga-Paga and the natural folk, who had no need to toil nor spin to live
upon the fat of the land and be arrayed in the garments that were
always up to the minute in style.
Again I saw Honolulu, and, this time, stayed longer, and gave a
performance. But, though we were there longer, it was not long enough
to make me yield to that temptation to cuddle one of the brown lassies!
Aweel, I was not so young as I had been, and Mrs. Lauder-- you ken
that she was travelling with me?
In the harbor of Honolulu there was a German gunboat, the Geier, that
had run there for shelter not long since, and had still left a day or two,
under the orders from Washington, to decide whether she would let
herself be interned or not. And outside, beyond the three mile limit that
marked the end of American territorial waters, were two good reasons
to make the German think well of being interned. They were two
cruisers, squat and ugly and vicious in their gray war paint, that
watched the entrance to the harbor as you have seen a cat watching a
rat hole.
It was not Britain's white ensign that they flew, those cruisers. It was
the red sun flag of Japan, one of Britain's allies against the Hun. They
had their vigil in vain, did those two cruisers. It was valor's better part,
discretion, that the German captain chose. Aweel, you could no blame
him! He and his ship would have been blown out of the water so soon
as she poked her nose beyond American waters, had he chosen to go
out and fight.
I was glad indeed when we came in sight of the Golden Gate once more,
and when we were safe ashore in San Francisco. It had been a
nerve-racking voyage in many ways. My wife and I were torn with
anxiety about our boy. And there were German raiders loose; one or
two had, so far, eluded the cordon the British fleet had flung about the
world. One night, soon after we left Honolulu, we were stopped. We
thought it was a British cruiser that stopped us, but she would only ask
questions--answering those we asked was not for her!
But we were ashore at last. There remained only the trip across the
United States to New York and the voyage across the Atlantic home.
CHAPTER III
Now indeed we began to get real news of the war. We heard of how
that little British army had flung itself into the maw of the Hun. I came
to know something of the glories of the retreat from Mons, and of how
French and British had turned together at the Marne and had saved
Paris. But, alas, I heard too of how many brave men had died--had been
sacrificed, many and many a man of them, to the failure of Britain to
prepare.
That was past and done. What had been wrong was being mended now.
Better, indeed--ah, a thousand times better!--had Britain given heed to
Lord Roberts, when he preached the gospel of readiness and prayed his
countrymen to prepare for the war that he in his wisdom had foreseen.
But it was easier now to look into the future.
I could see, as all the world was beginning to see, that this war was not
like other wars. Lord Kitchener had said that Britain must make ready
for a three year war, and I, for one, believed him when others
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