as of pealing bells. The drab colours of London were shot with prismatic hues; never had the streets appeared so beautiful. There was even beauty in the fact of the outbreak of war, for England was going to war for the sake of liberty, which was a fine, a noble adventure. And how lovely the English girls and boys were, who crowded the pavements! they were like beds of exquisite flowers. For himself, he was going back to dine at the French restaurant in Soho, for that would be in the nature of supporting our new Allies. Afterwards there were the streets and the music-halls, and all the mysteries of the short summer night. Then dawn would break, rose-coloured dawn, with her finger on her lips, and sweet, silent mouth, a little ashamed of her sister, night, but sympathetic at heart. Dawn was always a little prudish, a little Quakerish.
The days of a divine August went by, and the line of German invasion swept forward like a tide that knows no ebb over all Belgium and North-East France. The British Expeditionary Force started, and was swept back like the flotsam on the seashore. The call came for the raising of an army, and east and west, north and south, the recruiting offices were like choked waterways, and still the flood of men, in whose hearts the fact of England had awoke, poured in. Hospitals were gorged with the returning wounded; women by the hundred and by the thousand volunteered as nurses, and went to hospitals to be trained. The whole of comfortable England, intent hitherto on its sports, its leisure, its general superiority to the rest of the world, suddenly became aware that an immense and vital danger threatened it. A chorus of objurgation arose from the brazen-throated press, each organ striving to shout the loudest, at the unpreparedness of the country, and much valuable energy
