It seems like a dream now, that beginning of war; like something
remembered very long ago, much longer ago than it really is.
I cannot even remember, at what moment we realized, Walter and
I, that war was coming, a war that would involve our country,
I mean; that it would involve us personally, as individuals,
we did not realize at that time at all; that came much later,
gradually and painfully, step by step.
We were, of course, far away in the physical sense; six miles
away from the nearest village of any size, with a post only three
times a week. We saw nobody who understood what was happening
better than ourselves, and we read the newspaper when it came
so little. Walter had always an aversion for newspapers, I never
quite knew why, and I was so absorbed in Eleanor, and the new
life with her, that the outer world seemed to have slipped right
away, when we got into the train at Euston.
The stages in these weeks that one now knows were turning points
in the catastrophe escaped us then with a completeness that seems
amazing.
The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia, when it came, meant nothing
at all. I remember Walter reading it aloud at breakfast, in the
farm parlour; even now the smell of hot coffee and bacon brings
that morning back to me, which is odd, considering how little
we realized its importance.
The paper had come the evening before, but we had not opened
it. Walter liked a paper at breakfast, not at other times. He
opened it and read it carelessly, not caring much what he found
there. He said:
‘There seems to be a dustup in the Balkans after all, over that
man being killed. Here is an Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia,’ and
he read a few lines of it aloud.
‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? going on like that at this
time of day. It seems to belong to the eighteenth century or
perhaps the seventeenth.’
And I said:
‘I suppose they are a century or two behind us over there.’
And we did not bother about it any more. We went a long walk
that day and came back rather tired, and hungry; and in the afternoon
it rained, and we could not read our Gibbon out of doors, as
we had meant to. I remember that we followed what happened in
the newspaper with a certain interest; it gave one something
to look for among the rather dull collection of Parliamentary
Debates and Home affairs, but it was an impersonal interest.
I remember one day thinking about it, and being shocked with
myself for minding it so little. That must have been some days
later, when Russia and Germany seemed to be coming in. I went
up on the hill behind the house, by myself, and sat down on the
grass, and tried to realize what was happening. I remember trying
to picture the Russian soldiers, and the Austrian soldiers, and
to think what it meant; those hundreds and thousands of people
leaving their homes, and going to fight.
‘Hundreds of them will be killed,’ I thought, ‘perhaps thousands,
and yet I don’t really mind; it doesn’t really affect me, just
because I don’t know them, and they live in countries that I
don’t know’; and it seemed to me dreadful that one’s sympathy
should be so limited.
And then another time, I did realize it for a bit; that was after
the German mobilization, when the French reservists were called
up; we had read the paper when it came that day, in the evening
after dinner, and somehow by that time, it had begun to seem
terrible; we had begun, I think, though very dimly, to feel the
trouble closing in all round.
We lay a long time awake that night, Walter and I, not speaking
to each other. The night was hot and oppressive, the darkness
seemed to press upon us like a weight.
I thought of the French and German homes where people were lying
in bed, awake too, and thinking about the next day, when the
men must go out to the army; and it became suddenly real to me;
perhaps because I had been in France and Germany, and knew some
French and German people, and understood that they were just
people like us.
And that made the others seem more real too, and I felt the immensity
of what was happening; I realized, dimly, the masses of people
in Austria and in Russia too.
And then a sense of unreality came over me. I felt myself a long
way off; looking on, as though I were disembodied; I seemed to
hear a great throbbing, very far away, a strange pulsating sound,
as though it were the heart of all the world; I suppose it was
really my own heart. I thought of birds in a storm, of clouds
gathering, of the lines in ‘In Memoriam’ about the rooks, of
the Dynasts and the Pities and Powers; and an acute, quite impersonal
sense of loss and desolation came over me.
Walter said suddenly:
‘This may be the end of Europe, of European civilization.’