Mrs. Sebright knitted a great deal. She belonged to a ‘Work Centre’;
ladies who met together three afternoons a week, and made shirts
and bandages and socks.
She was patriotic, and talked about ‘our brave boys,’ and said
that the British Army had never been beaten, and that the British
Navy was something that the world had never seen before. She
said, and seemed to believe, that English people were quite different
from the people of other nations; much braver, and more high
minded, less likely to do anything wrong or make mistakes.
I was puzzled by this attitude at first. I thought she was trying
to encourage herself by saying these things; but I found she
really did think they were true, and soon I got quite accustomed
to hear them said by other people, all round, every day. I thought
that there were good and bad people in our Army, and in other
Armies; brave soldiers and cowardly ones; I did not find it a
help to me at all to say more than that.
‘If we were all good, and the Germans all bad, the War would
matter less,’ I said, one day, but Mrs. Sebright thought it unpatriotic
to say anything like that.
‘When our own boys are fighting in the trenches,’ she said. ‘You
surprise me, Helen.’
Maud was much worse. She was not content with praising our own
Army and Navy, she kept on abusing the others. She came to stay
with us in the Christmas holidays, and told a great many stories
of German atrocities. In every case she would begin:
‘I know for a fact,’ or, ‘I have it on excellent authority’;
but when I asked her how she knew, or on whose authority, she
would get angry and did not explain.
She would say that the Germans must be taught a lesson. . . .
No civilized nation had ever behaved as they did . . . They were
‘unique in history.’
‘This policy of frightfulness is unparalleled,’ she said, ‘absolutely
unparalleled. They have forfeited their right to existence as
an independent nation.’
She had dismissed the German teacher in her school, and two little
German girls were excluded also. ‘Feeling runs too high,’ she
said. ‘I could not, in the circumstances, countenance their remaining.
I hope that German will be a dead language before long.’
X
Autumn passed into winter. The fall of Antwerp; escape of the
_Goeben_ and _Breslau_; Declaration of War with Turkey; the bombardment
of Scarborough and West Hartlepool these were landmarks in the
sea of events.
People had begun to accept the War as a natural state, to cease
expecting a sudden dramatic finish.
Mollie finished her three months’ training, and was drafted to
a War Hospital in Wales. She came to see me before she went.
She was serious and intent.
‘I wish I could do more,’ she said. ‘I hate to be safe, when
the others are in danger, don’t you feel that, Helen? I do hope
they will send me to the front.’