And I was thinking all the time, now, of my boy.  He was on his way.  He was on the Pacific.  He was coming to me, across the ocean, and I could smile as I thought of how this thing and that would strike him, and of the smile that would light up his face now and the look of joy that would come into his eyes at the sudden sighting of some beautiful spot.  Oh, aye—­those were happy days When each one brought my boy nearer to me.

One day, I mind, the newspapers were full of the tale of a crime ill an odd spot in Europe that none of us had ever heard of before.  You mind the place?  Serajevo!  Aye—­we all mind it now!  But then we read, and wondered how that outlandish name might be pronounced.  A foreigner was murdered—­what if he was a prince, the Archduke of Austria?  Need we lash ourselves about him?

And so we read, and were sorry, a little, for the puir lady who sat beside the Archduke and was killed with him.  And then we forgot it.  All Australia did.  There was no more in the newspapers.  And my son John was coming—­coming.  Each day he was so many hundred miles nearer to me.  And at last he came.  We were in Melbourne then, it was near to the end of July.

We had much to talk about—­son, and his mother and I. It was long months since we had seen him, and we had seen and done so much.  The time flew by.  Maybe we did not read the papers so carefully as we might have done.  They tell me, they have told me, since then, that in Europe and even in America, there was some warning after Austria moved on Serbia.  But I believe that down there in Australia they did not dream of danger; that they were far from understanding the meaning of the news the papers did print.  They were so far away!

And then, you ken, it came upon us like a clap of thunder.  One night it began.  There was war in Europe—­real war.  Germany had attacked France and Russia.  She was moving troops through Belgium.  And every Briton knew what that must mean.  Would Britain be drawn in?  There was the question that was on every man’s tongue.

“What do you think, son?” I asked John.

“I think we’ll go in,” he said.  “And if we do, you know, Dad—­they’ll send for me to come home at once.  I’m on leave from the summer training camp now to make this trip.”

My boy, two years before, had joined the Territorial army.  He was a second lieutenant in a Territorial battalion of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders.  It was much as if he had been an officer in a National Guard regiment in the United States.  The territorial army was not bound to serve abroad—­but who could doubt that it would, and gladly.  As it did—­to a man, to a man.

But it was a shock to me when John said that.  I had not thought that war, even if it came, could come home to us so close—­and so soon.

Yet so it was.  The next day was the fourth of August—­my birthday.  And it was that day that Britain declared war upon Germany.  We sat at lunch in the hotel at Melbourne when the newsboys began to cry the extras.  And we were still at lunch when the hall porter came in from outside.