For an hour the little bald-headed man spoke to me of all he had heard and learnt of Germany’s enmity to England during twelve months in official circles.  He desired to give this information to an English newspaper of standing and authority.  He thought the English people had a right to know.

I went back to my office more disturbed than I cared to admit even to myself.  There had been a kind of terror in the voice of the little man who had found time for other interests besides his “statistical survey of Europe.”  It seemed that he believed himself in the possession of an enormous and terrible secret threatening the destiny of our Empire.  Yet nobody would believe him when he told it, however fervently.  My editor would not believe him, and none of his words were published, in my paper or any other.  But sometimes I used to remember him and wonder whether perhaps in all such warnings that came to us there were not a horrible truth which one day, when brutally revealed, would make a mockery of all those men in England who pooh-poohed the peril, and of the idealists who believed that friendly relations with Germany could be secured by friendly words.  Meanwhile the Foreign Office did not reveal its secrets or give any clear guidance to the people as to perils or policy—­to the people who would pay in blood for ignorance.

10

When I stood on the deck of the Channel boat in Dover Harbour looking back on England, whose white cliffs gleamed faintly through the darkness, a sense of tragic certainty came to me that a summons of war would come to England, asking for her manhood.  Perhaps it would come to-night.  The second mate of the boat came to the side of the steamer and stared across the inky waters, on which there were shifting pathways of white radiance, as the searchlights of distant warships swept the sea.

“God!” he said, in a low voice.

“Do you think it will come to-night?” I asked, in the same tone of voice.  We spoke as though our words were dangerous.

“It’s likely.  The German fleet won’t wait for any declaration, I should say, if they thought they could catch us napping.  But they won’t.  I fancy we’re ready for them—­here, anyhow!”

He jerked his thumb at some dark masses looming through the darkness in the harbour, caught here and there by a glint of metal reflected in the water.  They were cruisers and submarines nosing towards the harbour mouth.

“There’s a crowd of ’em!” said the second mate, “and they stretch across the Channel. . . .  The Reserve men have been called out—­ taken off the trams in Dover to-night.  But the public has not yet woken up to the meaning of it.”

He stared out to sea again, and it was some minutes before he spoke again.

“Queer, isn’t it?  They’ll all sleep in their beds to-night as though nothing out of the way were happening.  And yet, in a few hours, maybe, there’ll be Hell!  That’s what it’s going to be—­Hell and damnation, if I know anything about war!”