He decided that Gladys, the facetiously named automobile, was a luxury, and sold her for a couple of hundred pounds.  He lost his gardener, who had gone to higher priced work with a miller, and he had great trouble to replace him, so that the garden became disagreeably unkempt and unsatisfactory.  He had to give up his frequent trips to London.  He was obliged to defer Statesminster for the boys.  For a time at any rate they must go as day boys to Brinsmead.  At every point he met this uncongenial consideration of ways and means.  For years now he had gone easy, lived with a certain self-indulgence.  It was extraordinarily vexatious to have one’s greater troubles for one’s country and one’s son and one’s faith crossed and complicated by these little troubles of the extra sixpence and the untimely bill.

What worried his mind perhaps more than anything else was his gradual loss of touch with the essential issues of the war.  At first the militarism, the aggression of Germany, had seemed so bad that he could not see the action of Britain and her allies as anything but entirely righteous.  He had seen the war plainly and simply in the phrase, “Now this militarism must end.”  He had seen Germany as a system, as imperialism and junkerism, as a callous materialist aggression, as the spirit that makes war, and the Allies as the protest of humanity against all these evil things.

Insensibly, in spite of himself, this first version of the war was giving place to another.  The tawdry, rhetorical German Emperor, who had been the great antagonist at the outset, the last upholder of Caesarism, God’s anointed with the withered arm and the mailed fist, had receded from the foreground of the picture; that truer Germany which is thought and system, which is the will to do things thoroughly, the Germany of Ostwald and the once rejected Hindenburg, was coming to the fore.  It made no apology for the errors and crimes that had been imposed upon it by its Hohenzollern leadership, but it fought now to save itself from the destruction and division that would be its inevitable lot if it accepted defeat too easily; fought to hold out, fought for a second chance, with discipline, with skill and patience, with a steadfast will.  It fought with science, it fought with economy, with machines and thought against all too human antagonists.  It necessitated an implacable resistance, but also it commanded respect.  Against it fought three great peoples with as fine a will; but they had neither the unity, the habitual discipline, nor the science of Germany, and it was the latter defect that became more and more the distressful matter of Mr. Britling’s thoughts.  France after her initial experiences, after her first reeling month, had risen from the very verge of defeat to a steely splendour of resolution, but England and Russia, those twin slack giants, still wasted force, were careless, negligent, uncertain.  Everywhere up and down the scale, from the stupidity