On Wednesday morning Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House, and he was still a civilian unassigned.

In the hall he found a tall figure in khaki standing and reading The Times that usually lay upon the hall table.  The figure turned at Mr. Britling’s entry, and revealed the aquiline features of Mr. Lawrence Carmine.  It was as if his friend had stolen a march on him.

But Carmine’s face showed nothing of the excitement and patriotic satisfaction that would have seemed natural to Mr. Britling.  He was white and jaded, as if he had not slept for many nights.  “You see,” he explained almost apologetically of the three stars upon his sleeve, “I used to be a captain of volunteers.”  He had been put in charge of a volunteer force which had been re-embodied and entrusted with the care of the bridges, gasworks, factories and railway tunnels, and with a number of other minor but necessary duties round about Easinghampton.  “I’ve just got to shut up my house,” said Captain Carmine, “and go into lodgings.  I confess I hate it....  But anyhow it can’t last six months....  But it’s beastly....  Ugh!...”

He seemed disposed to expand that “Ugh,” and then thought better of it.  And presently Mr. Britling took control of the conversation.

His two days in London had filled him with matter, and he was glad to have something more than Hugh and Teddy and Mrs. Britling to talk it upon.  What was happening now in Great Britain, he declared, was adjustment.  It was an attempt on the part of a great unorganised nation, an attempt, instinctive at present rather than intelligent, to readjust its government and particularly its military organisation to the new scale of warfare that Germany had imposed upon the world.  For two strenuous decades the British navy had been growing enormously under the pressure of German naval preparations, but the British military establishment had experienced no corresponding expansion.  It was true there had been a futile, rather foolishly conducted agitation for universal military service, but there had been no accumulation of material, no preparation of armament-making machinery, no planning and no foundations for any sort of organisation that would have facilitated the rapid expansion of the fighting forces of a country in a time of crisis.  Such an idea was absolutely antagonistic to the mental habits of the British military caste.  The German method of incorporating all the strength and resources of the country into one national fighting machine was quite strange to the British military mind—­still.  Even after a month of war.  War had become the comprehensive business of the German nation; to the British it was an incidental adventure.  In Germany the nation was militarised, in England the army was specialised.  The nation for nearly every practical purpose got along without it.  Just as political life had also become specialised....  Now suddenly we wanted a government to speak for every one, and an army of the whole people.  How were we to find it?