He served yet again as accredited reporter during the opening months of the Second World War, being billeted in the same areas in France as during the Great War.  After the evacuation of the BEF in 1940 he remained in Great Britain.  His son followed in his footsteps, taking up the profession of war reporter for the British press.

Anthony Langley

[1] Now It Can Be Told, by Philip Gibbs, is Project Gutenberg
E-book #3317, nicbt10.txt and nicb10.zip.  See
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext02/nicbt10.txt
or
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext02/nicbt10.zip

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.