From this Mr. Britling broke away into a fresh addition to his already large collection of contrasts between England and Germany.  Germany was a nation which has been swallowed up and incorporated by an army and an administration; the Prussian military system had assimilated to itself the whole German life.  It was a State in a state of repletion, a State that had swallowed all its people.  Britain was not a State.  It was an unincorporated people.  The British army, the British War Office, and the British administration had assimilated nothing; they were little old partial things; the British nation lay outside them, beyond their understanding and tradition; a formless new thing, but a great thing; and now this British nation, this real nation, the “outsiders,” had to take up arms.  Suddenly all the underlying ideas of that outer, greater English life beyond politics, beyond the services, were challenged, its tolerant good humour, its freedom, and its irresponsibility.  It was not simply English life that was threatened; it was all the latitudes of democracy, it was every liberal idea and every liberty.  It was civilisation in danger.  The uncharted liberal system had been taken by the throat; it had to “make good” or perish....

“I went up to London expecting to be told what to do.  There is no one to tell any one what to do....  Much less is there any one to compel us what to do....

“There’s a War Office like a college during a riot, with its doors and windows barred; there’s a government like a cockle boat in an Atlantic gale....

“One feels the thing ought to have come upon us like the sound of a trumpet.  Instead, until now, it has been like a great noise, that we just listened to, in the next house....  And now slowly the nation awakes.  London is just like a dazed sleeper waking up out of a deep sleep to fire and danger, tumult and cries for help, near at hand.  The streets give you exactly that effect.  People are looking about and listening.  One feels that at any moment, in a pause, in a silence, there may come, from far away, over the houses, faint and little, the boom of guns or the small outcries of little French or Belgian villages in agony....”

Such was the gist of Mr. Britling’s discourse.

He did most of the table talk, and all that mattered.  Teddy was an assenting voice, Hugh was silent and apparently a little inattentive, Mrs. Britling was thinking of the courses and the servants and the boys, and giving her husband only half an ear, Captain Carmine said little and seemed to be troubled by some disagreeable preoccupation.  Now and then he would endorse or supplement the things Mr. Britling was saying.  Thrice he remarked:  “People still do not begin to understand."...

Section 4 It was only when they sat together in the barn court out of the way of Mrs. Britling and the children that Captain Carmine was able to explain his listless bearing and jaded appearance.  He was suffering from a bad nervous shock.  He had hardly taken over his command before one of his men had been killed—­and killed in a manner that had left a scar upon his mind.