Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/436

Seated here in my study, and looking back upon the tremendous happenings of the past year, I can remember as though it were yesterday the August evening when there burst upon an amazed and wholly unprepared world the news that Peace, so often foretold and as often discredited, had actually been declared by Germany upon England.

What one finds most incredible, in retrospect, was the suddenness of the blow. To a people who had been for years lapped in the fog of war it came like lightning out of a sandstorm, like truth from a Teuton, like anything that is wholly bewildering and unexpected. The newspapers of the day before the great event make strange reading now. All appears to have been going on absolutely as at any time during the past six years. The usual Zeppelins were bombing blackbirds in the suburbs of Sheringham. In The Daily Telegram Dr. Pillon had his habitual article upon "The imminence of Balkan intervention." All, in short, was as long custom had habituated us to it. And then, quite suddenly, the cataclysm.

I have heard since that they had rumours of it in many quarters of London quite early on that afternoon; but the news did not reach us at Woking (where I was then living) before nightfall. Even the late editions contained no more than the intimation of an unusually prolonged sitting of the Cabinet. Smith, my neighbour, who dropped in from number five, Warsaw Villas, for his after-dinner pipe had heard only a vague report of a certain liveliness in Downing Street. So it was actually not till the following morning, when I opened my daily paper, that I knew the truth, saw it staring at me in huge letters right across the chief page—Peace!

Even then, you know, one hardly realized. Not even when Smith himself, purple and incoherent, burst in through the breakfast-room window (which I should perhaps explain was a French one, and open at the moment). "You've heard?" Words failed him. As for me I could only stare, bewildered by something strange and unfamiliar in the appearance of my old friend. Smith indeed had lost no time. Gone was the customary suit of sober khaki that he had worn so long as a private in the Underwriters' Battalion; and instead he now stood revealed in all the panoply of the full dress of the Brookwood Golf Club, scarlet coat, heather mixture stockings, and all.

Smith saw my look, and answered it. "Of course," he cried, "everybody's going. The road to the links is crowded already. It's Peace now, and no mistake!"

Slowly I began to understand.

One remembers that day as a kind of dream. The stupendous change that had come upon everything and everybody! In the train one heard it (for after a moment I had decided that, in spite of Smith, my own place in the hour of crisis was London). Men crowded the carriages, or stood about in groups at the stations, discussing excitedly the one topic. Most of them still wore their every-day khaki, but here and there was one, bolder than the rest, who already displayed, a little awkwardly, some symbol of the New Era—a bowler-hat perhaps, or even an umbrella, held with an air of self-consciousness in hands so long unused to anything more conspicuous than a Lee-Enfield. England, you perceive, was waking gradually.

And the scraps of talk one heard. Almost as unfamiliar some of it as Flemish must once have been. "If you take away State-aid from the Church—" a man would be saying; and another, "The vital question is simply this—can Carson be coerced?" It was really astonishing how quickly they had recovered the trick of it.

I fancy that full and complete comprehension came to me from two sources almost at the same moment. I had bought a score of papers, and torn them eagerly open. Each was more lurid and sensational than the last. Headlines in leaded type swam before my eyes—headlines that I had never looked to read again in this blandly bellicose existence to which I had grown so used. "Where are you going to spend August? "Is sea-bathing deleterious?" "Should children contradict?" and the like. But still I read as in a dream.

Then suddenly I saw two things. First, at the foot of the Haymarket, I observed, making his way through a crowd murmuring with admiration, a knut, a real knut, of the knuttiest age, twenty at most, in absolutely full peace-kit, down to monocle and spats. And almost at the same moment my motor-bus was held up to permit the passage of a column of females carrying banners. What were they? I turned to my neighbour, who, I noticed had grown suddenly pale.

"Suffragettes!" he whispered unsteadily, "walking to Hyde Park for a demonstration! That means Peace with a vengeance!"

It did. At his words the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw the truth of this amazing occurrence. And with that vision came also another thought, one that sent the blood racing to my heart, and froze it there. The girl I loved, the heroine of this work, Clorinda Fitz-Eustace was even now quietly at work as a red-cross nurse in a field hospital. At this very hour perhaps she might be quitting its gentle shade to adventure herself, all unconscious of danger, amid the hazards of Peace. I saw then that it must be mine to warn and save her. But how?