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I think the Middle Classes in England—­the plain men and women who do not belong to intellectual cliques or professional politics—­were stupefied by the swift development of the international “situation,” as it was called in the newspapers, before the actual declarations of war which followed with a series of thunder-claps heralding a universal tempest.  Was it true then that Germany had a deadly enmity against us, and warlike ambitions which would make a shambles of Europe?  Or was it still only newspaper talk, to provide sensations for the breakfast table?  How could they tell, these plain, ignorant men who had always wanted straightforward facts?

For years the newspaper press of England had been divided over Germany’s ambitions, precisely as, according to their political colour, they had been divided over Tariff Reform or Home Rule for Ireland.  The Liberal Press had jeered at the hair-raising fears of the Conservative Press, and the latter had answered the jeers by more ferocious attacks upon German diplomacy and by more determined efforts to make bad blood between the two nations.  The Liberal Press had dwelt lovingly upon the brotherly sentiment of the German people for their English cousins.  The Conservative Press had searched out the inflammatory speeches of the war lords and the junker politicians.  It had seemed to the man in the street a controversy as remote from the actual interests of his own life—­as remote from the suburban garden in which he grew his roses or from the golf links on which he spent his Saturday afternoons as a discussion on the canals of Mars.  Now and again, in moments of political excitement, he had taken sides and adopted newspaper phrases as his own, declaring with an enormous gravity which he did not really feel that “The German Fleet was a deliberate menace to our naval supremacy,” or joining in the chorus of “We want eight and we won’t wait,” or expressing his utter contempt for “all this militarism,” and his belief in the “international solidarity” of the new democracy.  But there never entered his inmost convictions that the day might come during his own lifetime when he—­a citizen of Suburbia—­might have to fight for his own hearthside and suffer the intolerable horrors of war while the roses in his garden were trampled down in mud and blood, and while his own house came clattering down like a pack of cards—­the family photographs, the children’s toys, the piano which he had bought on the hire system, all the household gods which he worshipped, mixed up in a heap of ruin—­as afterwards at Scarborough and Hartlepool, Ipswich, and Southend.

If such a thing were possible, why had the nation been duped by its Government?  Why had we been lulled into a false sense of security without a plain statement of facts which would have taught us to prepare for the great ordeal?  The Government ought to have known and told the truth.  If this war came the manhood of the nation would be unready and untrained.  We should have to scramble an army together, when perhaps it would be too late.