The morning papers had arrived late, and he had been reading them and re-reading them and musing over them intermittently until his family had insisted upon his coming out to the festivities.  They said that if for no other reason he must come to witness Aunt Wilshire’s extraordinary skill at the cocoanut shy.  She could beat everybody.  Well, one must not miss a thing like that.  The headlines proclaimed, “The Great Powers at War; France Invaded by Germany; Germany invaded by Russia; 100,000 Germans march into Luxemburg; Can England Abstain?  Fifty Million Loan to be Issued.”  And Germany had not only violated the Treaty of London but she had seized a British ship in the Kiel Canal....  The roundabouts were very busy and windily melodious, and the shooting gallery kept popping and jingling as people shot and broke bottles, and the voices of the young men and women inviting the crowd to try their luck at this and that rang loud and clear.  Teddy and Letty and Cissie and Hugh were developing a quite disconcerting skill at the dart-throwing, and were bent upon compiling a complete tea-set for the Teddy cottage out of their winnings.  There was a score of automobiles and a number of traps and gigs about the entrance to the portion of the park that had been railed off for the festival, the small Britling boys had met some nursery visitors from Claverings House and were busy displaying skill and calm upon the roundabout ostriches, and less than four hundred miles away with a front that reached from Nancy to Liege more than a million and a quarter of grey-clad men, the greatest and best-equipped host the world had ever seen, were pouring westward to take Paris, grip and paralyse France, seize the Channel ports, invade England, and make the German Empire the master-state of the earth.  Their equipment was a marvel of foresight and scientific organisation, from the motor kitchens that rumbled in their wake to the telescopic sights of the sharp-shooters, the innumerable machine-guns of the infantry, the supply of entrenching material, the preparations already made in the invaded country....

“Let’s try at the other place for the sugar-basin!” said Teddy, hurrying past.  “Don’t get two sugar-basins,” said Cissie breathless in pursuit.  “Hugh is trying for a sugar-basin at the other place.”

Then Mr. Britling heard a bellicose note.

“Let’s have a go at the bottles,” said a cheerful young farmer.  “Ought to keep up our shooting, these warlike times....”

Mr. Britling ran against Hickson from the village inn and learnt that he was disturbed about his son being called up as a reservist.  “Just when he was settling down here.  It seems a pity they couldn’t leave him for a bit.”

“’Tis a noosence,” said Hickson, “but anyhow, they give first prize to his radishes.  He’ll be glad to hear they give first prize to his radishes.  Do you think, Sir, there’s very much probability of this war?  It do seem to be beginning like.”