6

On my own lips there was the same incredulity when I said good-bye.  It was on July 29, and England had not yet picked up the gauntlet which Germany had flung into the face of European peace.

“I shall be back in a few days.  Armageddon is still a long way off.  The idea of it is too ridiculous and too damnable!”

I lay awake on the night before I left England with the credentials of a war correspondent on a roving commission, and there came into my head a vision of the hideous thing which was being hatched in the council chambers of Europe, even as the little clock ticked on my bedroom mantelpiece.  I thrust back this vision of blood by old arguments, old phrases which had become the rag-tags of political writers.

War with Germany?  A war in which half the nations of Europe would be flung against each other in a deadly struggle—­millions against millions of men belonging to the peoples of the highest civilization?  No, it was inconceivable and impossible.  Why should England make war upon Germany or Germany upon England?  We were alike in blood and character, bound to each other by a thousand ties of tradition and knowledge and trade and friendship.  All the best intellect of Germany was friendly to us.

7

In Hamburg two years ago I had listened to speeches about all that, obviously sincere, emotional in their protestations of racial comradeship.  That young poet who had become my friend, who had taken me home to his house in the country and whose beautiful wife had plucked roses for me in her garden, and said in her pretty English, “I send my best love with them to England”—­was he a liar when he spoke fine and stirring words about the German admiration for English literature and life, and when—­it was late in the evening and we had drunk some wine—­he passed his arm through mine and said, “If ever there were to be a war between our two countries I and all my friends in Hamburg would weep at the crime and the tragedy.”

On that trip to Hamburg we were banqueted like kings, we English journalists, and the tables were garlanded with flowers in our honour, and a thousand compliments were paid to us with the friendliest courtesy.  Were they all liars, these smiling Germans who had clinked glasses with us?

Only a few weeks before this black shadow of war had loomed up with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood-brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their own country.  We clinked glasses again, sang “God Save the King” and the “Wacht am Rhein,” compared the character of German and English literature, of German and English women, clasped hands, and said, “Auf wiedersehen!” Were we all liars in that room, and did any of the men there know that when words of friendship were on their lips there was hatred in their hearts and in each country a stealthy preparation for great massacres of men?  Did any of, those German editors hear afar off the thunderstrokes of the Krupp guns which even then were being tested for the war with France and England?  I believe now that some of them must have known.