“Then, as I began to crawl about, came the crisis of the war.  Ill news piled on ill news; the army in France was down with an epidemic; each day’s news was worse than the last; to top all, the Germans found the fleet.  It was in letters a foot long about London—­newsboys crying awful words: 

“‘Fleet discovered—­German submarines and Zeppelins approaching.’

“A bit later, still worse.  ’The Bellerophon sunk by German torpedo—­ten dreadnoughts sunk—­’ There were the names of the big ships, the Queen Elizabeth, the Warspite, the Thunderer, the Agamemnon, the King Edward—­a lot more, battle cruisers, too—­then ten more dreadnoughts—­and more and worse every hour.  The German navy was said to be coming into the North Sea and advancing to our coast.  And our navy was going—­gone—­nothing to stand between us and the fate of Belgium.

“Then England went mad!  I thank God I’ll not live through such days again.  The land went mad with fear.  You’ll remember that there had been a three-year strain which human nerves were not meant to bear.  Well, there was a faction who urged that the only sane act now possible was to surrender to Germany quickly and hope for a mercy which we couldn’t get if we struggled.  The government, under enormous pressure, weakened.  It’s easy to cry ‘Shame!’ now, but how could it stand firm with the country stampeding back of it?

“So things were the day of the mass meeting in Trafalgar Square.  I was tall, and so thin and gaunt that, with my uniform and my arm in its sling, it was easy to get close to the front, straight under the speakers.  And no sooner had I got there than I was seized with a restlessness, an uncontrollable desire to see my godfather—­Kitchener.  Only to see him, to lay eyes on him.  I wish I might express to you the push of that feeling.  It was thirst in a desert.  With that spell on me I stood down in front of the stone lions and stared up at Nelson on his column, and listened to the speakers.  They were mad, quite, those speakers.  The crowd was mad, too.  It overflowed that great space, and there were few steady heads in the lot.  You’ll realize it looked a bit of a close shave, with the German navy coming and our fleet being destroyed, no one knew how fast, and the army in France, and struck down by illness.  At that moment it looked a matter of three or four days before the Huns would be landing.  Never before in a thousand years was England as near the finish.  As I stood there fidgeting, with the starvation on me for my godfather, it flashed to me that there’s a legend in every nation about some one of its heroes, how in the hour of need he will come back to save the people—­Charlemagne in France, don’t you know, and Barbarossa and King Arthur and—­oh, a number.  And I spoke aloud, so that the chap next prodded me in the ribs and said:  ’Stop that, will you?  I can’t hear’—­I spoke aloud and said: 

“‘This is the hour.  Come back and save us.’