The Conscript and the Crisis

Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening. And I
think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to record
as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on his mind
by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of any modern
problem or campaign. Though all he saw of a railway strike was a flat
meadow in Essex in which a train was becalmed for an hour or two, he will
probably throw more light on the strike by describing this which he has
seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce and the bloody
leaders of the mob whom he has never seen--nor any one else either. If he
comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo (as happened to a friend
of my grandfather) he should still remember that a true account of the day
after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing to have. Though he was on
the wrong side of the door when Rizzio was being murdered, we should still
like to have the wrong side described in the right way. Upon this
principle I, who know nothing of diplomacy or military arrangements, and
have only held my breath like the rest of the world while France and
Germany were bargaining, will tell quite truthfully of a small scene I saw,
one of the thousand scenes that were, so to speak, the anterooms of that
inmost chamber of debate.

In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares of
a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those gray and
rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden, like the
solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows; the sloping
roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping with damp;
and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were scoured with
old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with many doors and
found two grubby children playing there out of the rain. I also found a
notice of services, etc., and among these I found the announcement that at
11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there would be a special service
for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft of young men who were being
taken from their homes in that little town and sent to serve in the French
Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful moment, when the French Army was
encamped at a parting of the ways. There were already a great many people
there when I entered, not only of all kinds, but in all attitudes,
kneeling, sitting, or standing about. And there was that general sense
that strikes every man from a Protestant country, whether he dislikes the
Catholic atmosphere or likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing
was "going on all the time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual
process, as if it were a sort of