You have to go along with it.

And in October of the following year, October, 1913, life was going along at a most delirious and thrilling and entirely fascinating speed.  There never was such a delicious and exciting and progressive year as between October, 1912, and October, 1913.

And it certainly took not the remotest notice of Sabre.

In February, Lord Roberts, at Bristol, opened a provincial campaign for National Service.  The best people—­that is to say those who did not openly laugh at it or, being scaremongers, rabidly approve it—­considered it a great shame and a great pity that the poor old man should thus victimise those closing years of his life which should have been spent in that honourable retirement which is the right place for fussy old people of both sexes and all walks of life.

Sabre, reading the reports of the campaign—­two or three lines—­could not but reflect how events were falsifying, and continued to falsify the predictions of the intense Otway in this regard.  Deliciously pleasant relations with Germany were variously evidenced throughout 1913.  The King and Queen attended in Berlin the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter, and the popular Press, in picture and paragraph, told the genial British public what a thoroughly delightful girl the Kaiser’s daughter was.  The Kaiser let off loud “Hochs!” of friendly pride, and the Press of the world responded with warm “Hochs” of admiration and tribute; and the Kaiser, glowing with generous warmth, celebrated the occasion by releasing and handsomely pardoning three of those very British “spies” to whose incarceration in German fortresses (Sabre recalled) the intense Otway had attached such deep significance.  This was a signal for more mutual “Hochs.”  Later the Prince of Wales visited Germany and made there an extended stay of nine weeks; and in June the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emperor William’s accession was “Hoch’d” throughout the German Empire and admiringly “Hoch’d” back again from all quarters of the civilised globe.

It was all splendid and gratifying and deeply comforting.  So many “Hochs!” and such fervent and sincere “Hochs!” never boomed across the seas of the world, and particularly the North Sea or (nice and friendly to think) German Ocean, in any year as in the year 1913.

II

Not that relations with Germany counted for anything in the whirl of intensely agreeable sensations of these excellent days.  Their entirely pleasing trend prevented the scaremongers from interfering with full enjoyment of the intensely agreeable sensations; otherwise they were, by comparison with more serious excitements, completely negligible.  The excitements were endless and of every nature.  At one moment the British Public was stirred to its depths in depths not often touched (in 1913) by reading of Scott’s glorious death in the Antarctic; at another it was