They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to Scotland for a weekend instead of back to the firing-line.  British phlegm this is called.  No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred, individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public; the instinct of keeping things which are one’s own to one’s self.  Personally, I like this way.  In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train windows, the subject is always war.  War creeps into golf, or shooting, or investments, or politics.  Only one suggestion quite frees the mind from the omnipresent theme:  Will the Channel be smooth?  The Germans have nothing to do with that.  It is purely a matter of weather.  Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the shell-fire they are going to face.

With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded British sea lane.  In all my crossings I was never delayed.  For England had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began.  The only submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers.  Antennae these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power, felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no less than Labrador.  Thousands of transports had come and gone, carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and guns to India; and on the high road to India, to Australia, to San Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives or flies.

The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay!  Everybody in the one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to be in uniform; to have something to do with war.  All surroundings become those of war long before you reach the front.  That knot of civilians, waiting their turn for another examination of the same kind as that on the other side of the Channel, have shown good reasons for going to Paris to the French Consul in London, or they might not proceed even this far on the road of war.  They seem outcasts—­a humble lot in the variegated costumes of the civil world—­outcasts from the disciplined world in its pattern garb of khaki.  Their excuse for not being in the game is that they are too old or that they are women.  For now the war has sucked into its vortex the great majority of those who are strong enough to fight or work.

A traveller might be a spy; hence, all this red tape for the many to catch the one.  Even red tape seems now to have become normal.  War is normal.  It would seem strange to cross the Channel in time of peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians not having to show passports, and without the white hospital ships, and the white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the gangway, and the board held up with lists of names of officers who have telegrams waiting for them.