Some things are so shocking that they seem to have given no shock at
all, just as there are noises that are silences because they burst the
ears. And for some days after the declaration of war against Germany
the whole business seemed a vast burlesque. It was incredible that
this great people, for whom all Western Europe has mingled, and will
to the end of time mingle, admiration with a certain humorous
contempt, was really advancing upon civilization, enormously armed,
scrupulously prepared, bellowing, "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber
Alles!" smashing, destroying, killing. We felt for a time, in spite of
reason, that it was a joke, that presently Michael would laugh....
But by Jove! the idiot wasn't laughing....
For some weeks nobody in the circle about Boon talked of anything but
the war. The Wild Asses of the Devil became an allusion, to indicate
all this that was kicking Europe to splinters. We got maps, and still
more maps; we sent into the town for newspapers and got special
intelligence by telephone; we repeated and discussed rumours. The
Belgians were showing pluck and resource, but the French were
obviously shockingly unprepared. There were weeks--one may confess it
now that they have so abundantly proved the contrary--when the French
seemed crumpling up like pasteboard. They were failing to save the
line of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon; there were surrenders, there
was talk of treachery, and General French, left with his flank
exposed, made a costly retreat. It was one Sunday in early September
that Wilkins came to us with a _Sunday Observer_. "Look," he said,
"they are down on the Seine! They are sweeping right round behind the
Eastern line. They have broken the French in two. Here at Senlis they
are almost within sight of Paris...."
Then some London eavesdropper talked of the British retreat.
"Kitchener says our Army has lost half its fighting value. Our base is
to be moved again from Havre to La Rochelle...."
Boon sat on the edge of his hammock.
"The Germans must be beaten," he said. "The new world is killed; we go
back ten thousand years; there is no light, no hope, no thought nor
freedom any more unless the Germans are beaten.... Until the Germans
are beaten there is nothing more to be done in art, in literature, in
life. They are a dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, interfering,
and intolerably conceited people. A world under their dominance will
be intolerable. I will not live in it...."
"I had never believed they would do it," said Wilkins....
"Both my boys," said Dodd, "have gone into the Officers' Training
Corps. They were in their cadet corps at school."
"Wasn't one an engineer?" asked Boon.
"The other was beginning to paint rather well," said Dodd. "But it all
has to stop."
"I suppose I shall have to do something," said the London
eavesdropper. "I'm thirty-eight.... I can ride and I'm pretty fit....
It's a nuisance."
"What is a man of my kind to do?" asked Wilkins. "I'm forty-eight."
"I can't believe the French are as bad as they seem," said Boon. "But,
anyhow, we've no business to lean on the French.... But I wonder
now---- Pass me that map."