Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal.  You see those bundles hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speeding on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, and the dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls.  For the space of a few hours you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling papers—­placards everywhere vociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father to finish—­a million scattered people reading—­reading headlong—­or feverishly ready to read.  It is just as if some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. . .

And then you know, wonderfully gone—­gone utterly, vanished as foam might vanish upon the sand.

Nonsense!  The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—­signifying nothing. . . .

And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands, as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark underground kitchen of my mother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the yelp of the headlines.  She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper.  There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about.  And all over the country that day, millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the same magnetic spell, came round—­how did we say it?—­Ah!—­“to face the foe.”

The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf.  The column headed “Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth.  Does it Matter?” went unread.  “Germany”—­I usually figured this mythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor enhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword—­had insulted our flag.  That was the message of the New Paper, and the monster towered over me, threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting upon my faultless country’s colors.  Somebody had hoisted a British flag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken German officer under ambiguous instructions had torn it down.  Then one of the convenient abundant natives of the country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot in the leg.  But the facts were by no means clear.  Nothing was clear except that we were not going to stand any nonsense from Germany.  Whatever had or had not happened we meant to have an apology for, and apparently they did not mean apologizing.