The Soul of the War | Page 2

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Chapter I
The Foreboding

1
What man may lay bare the soul of England as it was stirred during
those days of July when suddenly, without any previous warning, loud
enough to reach the ears of the mass of people, there came the menace
of a great, bloody war, threatening all that had seemed so safe and so
certain in our daily life? England suffered in those summer days a
shock which thrilled to its heart and brain with an enormous emotion
such as a man who has been careless of truth and virtue experiences at
a "Revivalist" meeting or at a Catholic mission when some passionate
preacher breaks the hard crust of his carelessness and convinces him
that death and the judgment are very near, and that all the rottenness of
his being will be tested in the furnace of a spiritual agony. He goes
back to his home feeling a changed man in a changed world. The very
ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece of his sitting-room speaks to
him with a portentous, voice, like the thunder-strokes of fate. Death is
coming closer to him at every tick. His little home, his household goods,
the daily routine of his toil for the worldly rewards of life, his paltry
jealousies of next-door neighbours are dwarfed to insignificance. They
no longer matter, for the judgment of God is at hand. The smugness of
his self-complacency, his life-long hypocrisy in the shirking of truth,
are broken up. He feels naked, and afraid, clinging only to the hope that
he may yet have time to build up a new character, to acquire new
spiritual strength, and to do some of the things he has left undone--if
only he had his time over again!--before the enemy comes to grips with
him in a final bout.
That, with less simplicity and self-consciousness, was the spirit of

England in those few swift days which followed the Austrian
ultimatum to Serbia, and Germany's challenge to France and Russia. At
least in some such way one might express the mentality of the
governing, official, political, and so-called intellectual classes of the
nation who could read between the lines of diplomatic dispatches, and
saw, clearly enough, the shadow of Death creeping across the fields of
Europe and heard the muffled beating of his drum.
Some of our public men and politicians must have spent tortured days
and nights in those last days of July. They, too, like the sinner at the
mission service, must have seen the judgment of God approaching
them. Of what, avail now were their worldly ambitions and their
jealousies? They too had been smug in their self- complacency,
hypocrites, shirkers of truth and stirrers up of strife, careless of
consequences. If only they could have their time over again! Great God!
was this war with Germany an unavoidable horror, or, if the worst
came, was there still time to cleanse the nation of its rottenness, to
close up its divisions and to be ready for the frightful conflict?
2
All things were changed in England in a day or two. The things that
had mattered no longer mattered. The Arming of Ulster and the
Nationalists, Votes for Women, Easier Divorce, the Craze for Night
Clubs--had any of these questions any meaning now? A truce was
called by the men who had been inflaming the people's passion to the
point of civil war. The differences of political parties seemed futile and
idiotic now that the nation itself might be put to the uttermost test of
endurance by the greatest military power in Europe. In fear, as well as
with a nobler desire to rise out of the slough of the old folly of life, the
leaders of the nation abandoned then-feuds. Out of the past voices
called to them. Their blood thrilled to old sentiments and old traditions
which had seemed to belong to the lumber-room of history, with the
moth-eaten garments of their ancestors. There were no longer Liberals
or Conservatives or Socialists, but only Englishmen, Scotsmen,
Irishmen and Welshmen, with the old instincts of race and with the old
fighting qualities which in the past they had used against each other.

Before the common menace they closed up their ranks.
3
Yet there was no blood-lust in England, during those days of July.
None of the old Jingo spirit which had inflamed great crowds before
the Boer War was visible now or found expression. Among people of
thoughtfulness there was a kind of dazed incredibility that this war
would really happen, and at the back of this unbelief a tragic
foreboding and a kind of shame--a foreboding that secret forces were at
work for war, utterly beyond the control of European democracies who
desired to live in peace, and a