But enough of this.  For our little band there was the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West.  It is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there.  Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, France giving in under repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and England involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic!  Polish papers, of course, had no other but German sources of information.  Naturally, we did not believe all we read, but it was sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness.

We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up.  But it was a beastly time.  People used to come to me with very serious news and ask, “What do you think of it?” And my invariable answer was:  “Whatever has happened, or is going to happen, whoever wants to make peace, you may be certain that England will not make it, not for ten years, if necessary."’

But enough of this, too.  Through the unremitting efforts of Polish friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna.  Once there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads.  We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who, all along, interested himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf, his invaluable assistance and the real friendliness of his reception in Vienna.  Owing to Mr. Penfield’s action we obtained the permission to leave Austria.  And it was a near thing, for his Excellency has informed my American publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have us detained till the end of the war.  However, we effected our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of call.

On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality.  We saw the signs of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British submarines in the Channel.  Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two Naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland, piloted the ship through the Downs.

The Downs!  There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life.  But what were to me now the futilities of an individual past?  As our ship’s head swung into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear found its way straight into my heart.  Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my wife’s eyes.  She also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders—­shaping the future.