Mr. Britling was a flame of exalted voluntaryism, of patriotic devotion, that day.

But behind all this bravery was the other thing, the second thing in the mind of Mr. Britling, a fear.  He was prepared now to spread himself like some valiant turkey-gobbler, every feather at its utmost, against the aggressor.  He was prepared to go out and flourish bayonets, march and dig to the limit of his power, shoot, die in a ditch if needful, rather than permit German militarism to dominate the world.  He had no fear for himself.  He was prepared to perish upon the battlefield or cut a valiant figure in the military hospital.  But what he perceived very clearly and did his utmost not to perceive was this qualifying and discouraging fact, that the war monster was not nearly so disposed to meet him as he was to meet the war, and that its eyes were fixed on something beside and behind him, that it was already only too evidently stretching out a long and shadowy arm past him towards Teddy—­and towards Hugh....

The young are the food of war....

Teddy wasn’t Mr. Britling’s business anyhow.  Teddy must do as he thought proper.  Mr. Britling would not even advise upon that.  And as for Hugh—­

Mr. Britling did his best to brazen it out.

“My eldest boy is barely seventeen,” he said.  “He’s keen to go, and I’d be sorry if he wasn’t.  He’ll get into some cadet corps of course—­he’s already done something of that kind at school.  Or they’ll take him into the Territorials.  But before he’s nineteen everything will be over, one way or another.  I’m afraid, poor chap, he’ll feel sold....”

And having thrust Hugh safely into the background of his mind as—­juvenile, doing a juvenile share, no sort of man yet—­Mr. Britling could give a free rein to his generous imaginations of a national uprising.  From the idea of a universal participation in the struggle he passed by an easy transition to an anticipation of all Britain armed and gravely embattled.  Across gulfs of obstinate reality.  He himself was prepared to say, and accordingly he felt that the great mass of the British must be prepared to say to the government:  “Here we are at your disposal.  This is not a diplomatists’ war nor a War Office war; this is a war of the whole people.  We are all willing and ready to lay aside our usual occupations and offer our property and ourselves.  Whim and individual action are for peace times.  Take us and use us as you think fit.  Take all we possess.”  When he thought of the government in this way, he forgot the governing class he knew.  The slack-trousered Raeburn, the prim, attentive Philbert, Lady Frensham at the top of her voice, stern, preposterous Carson, boozy Bandershoot and artful Taper, wily Asquith, the eloquent yet unsubstantial George, and the immobile Grey, vanished out of his mind; all those representative exponents of the way things are done in Great Britain faded in the glow of his imaginative effort; he forgot