We went back to London at the end of August. We had talked of
going for over a week before, but there seemed to be no trains.
The reservists were called up everywhere; the shepherd from the
farm was called up, and the cowman. They were in what was called
‘The Wagon Reserve.’
Walter said at first that we must go back to London at once,
then that we had no right to crowd up trains, when all space
was needed for troops.
In London, the excitement of war was everywhere; marching men,
army wagons, lorries, bugle calls, persistent, repeated, practised
over and over again. There was an open space not far from our
house; it had been a playing field for a school, and recruits
were drilling there all the day long; sharp loud sounds of the
sergeants’ orders, more bugle calls, marching men, and more marching
men; the pathetic sentimental marching songs, the dark blue uniforms
and convict-like caps of Kitchener’s Army; everything passed
through the untraceable stages from strangeness to familiarity,
and the war news mingled in a confused, disjointed way with the
daily sights and sounds.
The Belgian resistance; Liège; the fall of Liège; the first accounts
of German atrocities; the occupation of Brussels; the burning
of Louvain; fighting in the streets of Charleroi, where the dead
bodies pressed each other too closely to fall down, and the ranks
of the dead stood upright; that in particular brought the horror
of it home to me, I know.
Stories of crucifixion, of bayoneted women, of children with
their hands cut off; and the first inrush of Belgian refugees.
How the days passed, merged into one another, obliterated one
another, I do not know; the incredible changed somehow imperceptibly
into the accepted, the taken for granted, state of existence.
I was caught for a time by the general excitement, and so was
Walter. He bought war maps and pinned them to the doors, marking
the progress of the armies each morning and evening with little
coloured flags on pins.
Mr. Harland, a colleague of Walter’s who lived in Hampstead too,
used to come in and talk to Walter. He kept a chart with coloured
maps as well.
Then came dismay at the retreat from Mons; suddenly one day as
he was tracing out the line of ‘position in the rear,’ Walter
stood still, and they stared at each other.
‘By Jove!’ said Mr. Harland.
And Walter said, ‘Good Lord!’
‘Will they get to Paris?’
‘Will they break through?’
I sat and watched them, and the new consternation was as unreal
to me as the War itself had been at first.
Life went on for me, in a way, unbroken by the catastrophic events
all round. My own life seemed to reassert itself from the general
earthquake; my baby was as adorable, as absorbing as ever, and
I enjoyed being back in my own home.
I remembered the South African War; it had been very sad, very
terrible; my uncle Everard had been killed in it, he had been
a soldier, but it was always remote; I could not believe Walter
and Mr. Harland when they talked of an invasion of England, bombardment
by air, cutting off of the food supplies.
I wondered often during those first weeks what Guy and Hugo were
thinking of it all. They were at Yearsly, I believed, and George
and Mollie; they had been going down there too. Ralph had been
right, after all, that evening at Grandmother’s, and we had all
laughed at him. It seemed odd already, that we had not understood
what that Archduke’s murder would bring.
Guy had paid some attention, and George; George most, I thought.
I wondered very much what George would be thinking now.
My grandmother had been at Bath; she had gone to see a cousin
who lived at Bath. She did not come back till late in September.
I went to see her then and she told me that Guy and Hugo had
volunteered.