The great “Business as Usual” phase was already passing away, and London was in the full tide of recruiting enthusiasm.  That tide was breaking against the most miserable arrangements for enlistment it is possible to imagine.  Overtaxed and not very competent officers, whose one idea of being very efficient was to refuse civilian help and be very, very slow and circumspect and very dignified and overbearing, sat in dirty little rooms and snarled at this unheard-of England that pressed at door and window for enrolment.  Outside every recruiting office crowds of men and youths waited, leaning against walls, sitting upon the pavements, waited for long hours, waiting to the end of the day and returning next morning, without shelter, without food, many sick with hunger; men who had hurried up from the country, men who had thrown up jobs of every kind, clerks, shopmen, anxious only to serve England and “teach those damned Germans a lesson.”  Between them and this object they had discovered a perplexing barrier; an inattention.  As Mr. Britling made his way by St. Martin’s Church and across Trafalgar Square and marked the weary accumulation of this magnificently patriotic stuff, he had his first inkling of the imaginative insufficiency of the War Office that had been so suddenly called upon to organise victory.  He was to be more fully informed when he reached his club.

His impression of the streets through which he passed was an impression of great unrest.  There were noticeably fewer omnibuses and less road traffic generally, but there was a quite unusual number of drifting pedestrians.  The current on the pavements was irritatingly sluggish.  There were more people standing about, and fewer going upon their business.  This was particularly the case with the women he saw.  Many of them seemed to have drifted in from the suburbs and outskirts of London in a state of vague expectation, unable to stay in their homes.

Everywhere there were the flags of the Allies; in shop windows, over doors, on the bonnets of automobiles, on people’s breasts, and there was a great quantity of recruiting posters on the hoardings and in windows:  “Your King and Country Need You” was the chief text, and they still called for “A Hundred Thousand Men” although the demand of Lord Kitchener had risen to half a million.  There were also placards calling for men on nearly all the taxicabs.  The big windows of the offices of the Norddeutscher Lloyd in Cockspur Street were boarded up, and plastered thickly with recruiting appeals.

At his club Mr. Britling found much talk and belligerent stir.  In the hall Wilkins the author was displaying a dummy rifle of bent iron rod to several interested members.  It was to be used for drilling until rifles could be got, and it could be made for eighteen pence.  This was the first intimation Mr. Britling got that the want of foresight of the War Office only began with its unpreparedness for recruits.  Men were talking very freely in the club; one of the temporary effects of the war in its earlier stages was to produce a partial thaw in the constitutional British shyness; and men who had glowered at Mr. Britling over their lunches and had been glowered at by Mr. Britling in silence for years now started conversations with him.