. It is true that England had had her civil dissensions
and had made wars and conquests in every part of the globe and
established an immense empire, but that last, as Mr. Britling had told
Mr. Direck, was "an excursion." She had just sent out younger sons and
surplus people, emigrants and expeditionary forces. Her own soil had
never seen any successful foreign invasion; her homeland, the bulk of
her households, her general life, had gone on untouched by these things.
Nineteen people out of twenty, the middle class and most of the lower
class, knew no more of the empire than they did of the Argentine
Republic or the Italian Renaissance. It did not concern them. War that
calls upon every man and threatens every life in the land, war of the
whole national being, was a thing altogether outside English experience
and the scope of the British imagination. It was still incredible, it
was still outside the range of Mr. Britling's thoughts all through the
tremendous onrush and check of the German attack in the west that opened
the great war. Through those two months he was, as it were, a more and
more excited spectator at a show, a show like a baseball match, a
spectator with money on the event, rather than a really participating
citizen of a nation thoroughly at war....

Section 13

After the jolt of the food panic and a brief, financial scare, the vast
inertia of everyday life in England asserted itself. When the public
went to the banks for the new paper money, the banks tendered
gold--apologetically. The supply of the new notes was very insufficient,
and there was plenty of gold. After the first impression that a
universal catastrophe had happened there was an effect as if nothing had
happened.

Shops re-opened after the Bank Holiday, in a tentative spirit that
speedily became assurance; people went about their business again, and
the war, so far as the mass of British folk were concerned, was for some
weeks a fever of the mind and intelligence rather than a physical and
personal actuality. There was a keen demand for news, and for a time
there was very little news. The press did its best to cope with this
immense occasion. Led by the _Daily Express_, all the halfpenny
newspapers adopted a new and more resonant sort of headline, the
streamer, a band of emphatic type that ran clean across the page and
announced victories or disconcerting happenings. They did this every
day, whether there was a great battle or the loss o