anything magnificent or terrible in
the German attack, or to regard the German Emperor or the Crown Prince
as anything more than figures of fun. From first to last their
conception of the enemy was an overstrenuous, foolish man, red with
effort, with protruding eyes and a forced frightfulness of demeanour.
That he might be tremendously lethal did not in the least obscure the
fact that he was essentially ridiculous. And if as the war went on the
joke grew grimmer, still it remained a joke. The German might make a
desert of the world; that could not alter the British conviction that he
was making a fool of himself.

And this disposition kept coming to the surface throughout the
afternoon, now in a casual allusion, now in some deliberate jest. The
small boys had discovered the goose step, and it filled their little
souls with amazement and delight. That human beings should consent to
those ridiculous paces seemed to them almost incredibly funny. They
tried it themselves, and then set out upon a goose-step propaganda.
Letty and Cissie had come up to the Dower House for tea and news, and
they were enrolled with Teddy and Hugh. The six of them, chuckling and
swaying, marched, in vast scissor strides across the lawn. "Left," cried
Hugh. "Left."

"Toes _out_ more," said Mr. Lawrence Carmine.

"Keep stiffer," said the youngest Britling.

"Watch the Zeppelins and look proud," said Hugh. "With the chest out.
_Zo!_"

Mrs. Britling was so much amused that she went in for her camera, and
took a snapshot of the detachment. It was a very successful snapshot,
and a year later Mr. Britling was to find a print of it among his
papers, and recall the sunshine and the merriment....

Section 11

That night brought the British declaration of war against Germany. To
nearly every Englishman that came as a matter of course, and it is one
of the most wonderful facts in history that the Germans were surprised
by it. When Mr. Britling, as a sample Englishman, had said that there
would never be war between Germany and England, he had always meant that
it was inconceivable to him that Germany should ever attack Belgium or
France. If Germany had been content to fight a merely defensive war upon
her western frontier and let Belgium alone, there would scarcely have
been such a thing as a war party in Great Britain. But the attack upon
Belgium, the westward thrust, made the whole nation flame unanimously
into war. It settled a question that was