in open debate up to the very
outbreak of the conflict. Up to the last the English had cherished the
idea that in Germany, just as in England, the mass of people were
kindly, pacific, and detached. That had been the English mistake.
Germany was really and truly what Germany had been professing to be for
forty years, a War State. With a sigh--and a long-forgotten
thrill--England roused herself to fight. Even now she still roused
herself sluggishly. It was going to be an immense thing, but just how
immense it was going to be no one in England had yet imagined.

Countless men that day whom Fate had marked for death and wounds stared
open-mouthed at the news, and smiled with the excitement of the
headlines, not dreaming that any of these things would come within three
hundred miles of them. What was war to Matching's Easy--to all the
Matching's Easies great and small that make up England? The last home
that was ever burnt by an enemy within a hundred miles of Matching's
Easy was burnt by the Danes rather more than a thousand years ago....
And the last trace of those particular Danes in England were certain
horny scraps of indurated skin under the heads of the nails in the door
of St. Clement Danes in London....

Now again, England was to fight in a war which was to light fires in
England and bring death to English people on English soil. There were
inconceivable ideas in August, 1914. Such things must happen before they
can be comprehended as possible.

Section 12

This story is essentially the history of the opening and of the
realisation of the Great War as it happened to one small group of people
in Essex, and more particularly as it happened to one human brain. It
came at first to all these people in a spectacular manner, as a thing
happening dramatically and internationally, as a show, as something in
the newspapers, something in the character of an historical epoch rather
than a personal experience; only by slow degrees did it and its
consequences invade the common texture of English life. If this story
could be represented by sketches or pictures the central figure would be
Mr. Britling, now sitting at his desk by day or by night and writing
first at his tract "And Now War Ends" and then at other things, now
walking about his garden or in Claverings park or going to and fro in
London, in his club reading the ticker or in his hall reading the
newspaper, with ideas and impressions continually clustering, expandi