have been living in holy calm and hushed silence with only now
and then a slight clink of metal, as if in some distant part of mankind's
habitation some restless body had stumbled over a heap of old armour.

II.

We who have learned by now what a world-war is like may be excused for
considering the disturbances of that period as insignificant brawls, mere
hole-and-corner scuffles. In the world, which memory depicts as so
wonderfully tranquil all over, it was the sea yet that was the safest
place. And the Red Ensign, commercial, industrial, historic, pervaded
the sea! Assertive only by its numbers, highly significant, and, under
its character of a trade--emblem, nationally expressive, it was symbolic
of old and new ideas, of conservatism and progress, of routine and
enterprise, of drudgery and adventure--and of a certain easy-going
optimism that would have appeared the Father of Sloth itself if it had
not been so stubbornly, so everlastingly active.

The unimaginative, hard-working men, great and small, who served this
flag afloat and ashore, nursed dumbly a mysterious sense of its
greatness. It sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours under the
sleepless eye of the sun. It held up the Edifice. But it crowned it
too. This is not the extravagance of a mixed metaphor. It is the sober
expression of a not very complex truth. Within that double function the
national life that flag represented so well went on in safety, assured of
its daily crust of bread for which we all pray and without which we would
have to give up faith, hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of
our minds and the sanctified strength of our labouring arms. I may
permit myself to speak of it in these terms because as a matter of fact
it was on that very symbol that I had founded my life and (as I have said
elsewhere in a moment of outspoken gratitude) had known for many years no
other roof above my head.

In those days that symbol was not particularly regarded. Superficially
and definitely it represented but one of the forms of national activity
rather remote from the close-knit organisations of other industries, a
kind of toil not immediately under the public eye. It was of its Navy
that the nation, looking out of the windows of its world-wide Edifice,
was proudly aware. And that was but fair. The Navy is the armed man at
the gate. An existence depending upon the sea must be guarded with a
jealous, sleepless vigilance, fo