tered each other:
authors, painters, musicians, dilettanti, administrators. The hostess
had good-naturedly invited a high official of the Foreign Office,
whom I had not seen for many years; she did not say so, but her
aim therein was to expedite the arrangements for my pilgrimages in
the war-zone. Sundry of my old friends were present. It was
wonderful how many had escaped active service, either because
they were necessary to central administration, or because they were
neutrals, or because they were too old, or because they had been
declined on account of physical unfitness, reformes. One or two who
might have come failed to do so because they had perished.

Amid the abounding, dazzling confusion of objects which it was a
duty to admire, people talked cautiously of the war. With tranquillity
and exactness and finality the high official, clad in pale alpaca and
yellow boots, explained the secret significance of Yellow Books,
White Books, Orange Books, Blue Books. The ultimate issues were
never touched. New, yet unprinted, music was played; Schumann,
though German enough, was played. Then literature came to the
top. A novelist wanted to know what I thought of a book called "The
Way of All Flesh," which he had just read. It is singular how that
ruthless book makes its way across all frontiers. He also wanted to
know about Gissing, a name new to him. And then a voice from the
obscurity of the balcony came startlingly to me in the music-room:

"Tell me! Sincerely--do they hate the Germans in England? Do they
hate them, veritably? Tell me. I doubt it. I doubt strongly."

I laughed, rather awkwardly, as any Englishman would.

The transient episode was very detrimental to literary talk.

Negotiations for a private visit to the front languished. The thing was
arranged right enough, but it seemed impossible to fix a day actually
starting. So I went to Meaux. Meaux had stuck in my ears. Meaux
was in history and in romances; it is in Dumas. It was burnt by the
Normans in the tenth century, and terrific massacres occurred
outside its walls in the fourteenth century, massacres in which the
English aristocracy took their full share of the killing. Also, in the
seventeenth century, Bossuet was Bishop of Meaux. Finally, in the
twentieth century, the Germans just got to Meaux, and they got no
further. It was, so far as I can make out, the nearest point to Paris
which they soiled.

I could not go even to Meaux without formalities,