“How about the feeling in France, Mr. Smith?”

“I can’t tell you how overwhelmingly pathetic it is—­the sight of these brave Frenchmen.  Every one has remarked it.  Once and for all the tradition that the French are an excitable, emotional people with no grip on their passions and no rein on their impulses—­that fiction is dead for all time.

“I saw that whole first act of France’s drama.  I saw the French people stand still on that first day and take breath.  Then I saw France set to work.  She was unprepared, but she was ready in spirit.  There was no excitement, there were no demonstrations.  The men climbed into their trains without any exhibitions of patriotism, without any outbursts.  There were many women crying quietly, with children huddled about their skirts.

“The spirit of England is different, but there is the same lack of excitement.  I chartered a motor bus when the war broke out and got to Paris, and then went back to London, where I sketched for a month, saw my friends, and talked war.

“Making sketches in war time is very different, by the way, from making sketches in time of peace.  It is a business full of possibilities, when all manner of spy suspicions are afloat.  I made up my mind to do a sketch of the Royal Exchange.  Not as I should have done it a year before, mind you, nor even three months before, but now, with the thought of bomb-dropping Zeppelins in the back of my mind.  It occurred to me when I was hurrying along one rainy evening in a taxi past the Stock Exchange, the Globe Insurance, the Bank of England.  Everywhere cabs drawn up along the curbing, cabs slipping past, people, great moving crowds of people with their umbrellas up, moving off down Threadneedle and Victoria.

“A lot of human life and some very beautiful architecture and a good part of the world’s business, all concentrated here.  And I thought to myself what might happen should the cultured Germans get as far as London, and should the defenders of the world’s civilization drop a bomb down into the heart of things here.  I pictured to myself what havoc could be wrought.

“And I thought, too, of places like Southwark.  Ever been in Southwark?  Horrible.  A year before, when I was making the sketches for my Dickens book, I spent a great deal of time in the Southwark section.  Now, with the prospect of Zeppelins, I thought again of Southwark.  A bomb in a Southwark street!  Good Lord, can you imagine the horror of it!  There fifty or sixty families are packed into a single tenement, and the houses in their turn are packed one against the next along streets so narrow that the buildings seem to be nodding to each other, touching foreheads almost.  Desperately poor people, children swarming every moment of the day and night up and down these dark stairways, up and down these hideously dark streets.  Now drop a bomb in the midst of it all.  That is what Englishmen are thinking of now.