One such incident does for all, whether the war be young or old.  There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband.  I was rather glad that I did not know this pair.  If I had known them I should be looking at the casualty list for his name and I might not enjoy my faith that he will return alive.  These two seemed to me the best of England.  I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words.  The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home.  It was the hour of war, not of talk.

On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a street corner at the same time as myself.  By all criteria, the world and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world.  We spoke together about the news.  Already the new democracy which the war has developed was in evidence.  Everybody had common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.

“It’s clear that we have had a bad knock.  Why deny it?” he said.  Then he added quietly, after a pause:  “This is a personal call for me.  I’m going to enlist.”

England’s answer to that “bad knock” was out of her experience.  She had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the last battle.  The next day’s news was worse and the next day’s still worse.  The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches.  Paris might fall—­no matter!  Though the French army were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest victory from defeat.  The spirit of this was fine, but one realized the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost.  To say so then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.

The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided.  My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe.  Where next?  To Havre!  Events were moving with the speed which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.

Every event was hidden under the “fog of war,” then a current expression—­meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines.  The marvel was that any but troop trains should run.  All night in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris!  Tired and preoccupied passengers; everyone’s heart heavy; everyone’s soul wrenched; everyone prepared for the worst!  You cared for no other man’s views; the one thing you wanted was no bad news.  France had known that when the war came it would be to the death.  From the first no Frenchman could have had any illusions.  England had not realized yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and all the world’s was with the British fleet.