Chapter 6

BOOK II

MATCHING'S EASY AT WAR

CHAPTER THE FIRST

ONLOOKERS

Section 1

On that eventful night of the first shots and the first deaths Mr.
Britling did not sleep until daylight had come. He sat writing at this
pamphlet of his, which was to hail the last explosion and the ending of
war. For a couple of hours he wrote with energy, and then his energy
flagged. There came intervals when he sat still and did not write. He
yawned and yawned again and rubbed his eyes. The day had come and the
birds were noisy when he undressed slowly, dropping his clothes anyhow
upon the floor, and got into bed....

He woke to find his morning tea beside him and the housemaid going out
of the room. He knew that something stupendous had happened to the
world, but for a few moments he could not remember what it was. Then he
remembered that France was invaded by Germany and Germany by Russia, and
that almost certainly England was going to war. It seemed a harsh and
terrible fact in the morning light, a demand for stresses, a certainty
of destruction; it appeared now robbed of all the dark and dignified
beauty of the night. He remembered just the same feeling of unpleasant,
anxious expectation as he now felt when the Boer War had begun fifteen
years ago, before the first news came. The first news of the Boer War
had been the wrecking of a British armoured train near Kimberley. What
similar story might not the overdue paper tell when presently it came?

Suppose, for instance, that some important division of our Fleet had
been surprised and overwhelmed....

Suppose the Germans were already crumpling up the French armies between
Verdun and Belfort, very swiftly and dreadfully....

Suppose after all that the Cabinet was hesitating, and that there would
be no war for some weeks, but only a wrangle about Belgian neutrality.
While the Germans smashed France....

Or, on the other hand, there might be some amazing, prompt success on
our part. Our army and navy people were narrow, but in their narrow way
he believed they were extraordinarily good....

What would the Irish do?...

His thoughts were no more than a thorny jungle of unanswerable questions
through which he struggled in un-progressive circles.

He got out of bed and dressed in a slow, distraught manner. When he
reached his braces he discontinued dressing for a time; he opened the
atlas at Northern France, and stood musing over the Belgian border. Then
he turned to Whitaker's Almanack to browse upon the statistics of the
great European armies. He was roused from this by the breakfast gong.

At breakfast there was no talk of anything but war. Hugh was as excited
as a cat in thundery weather, and the small