l. This is not a diplomatists' war nor a War Office war; this is
a war of the whole people. We are all willing and ready to lay aside our
usual occupations and offer our property and ourselves. Whim and
individual action are for peace times. Take us and use us as you think
fit. Take all we possess." When he thought of the government in this
way, he forgot the governing class he knew. The slack-trousered Raeburn,
the prim, attentive Philbert, Lady Frensham at the top of her voice,
stern, preposterous Carson, boozy Bandershoot and artful Taper, wily
Asquith, the eloquent yet unsubstantial George, and the immobile Grey,
vanished out of his mind; all those representative exponents of the way
things are done in Great Britain faded in the glow of his imaginative
effort; he forgot the dreary debates, the floundering newspapers, the
"bluffs," the intrigues, the sly bargains of the week-end party, the
"schoolboy honour" of grown men, the universal weak dishonesty in
thinking; he thought simply of a simplified and ideal government that
governed. He thought vaguely of something behind and beyond them,
England, the ruling genius of the land; something with a dignified
assurance and a stable will. He imagined this shadowy ruler miraculously
provided with schemes and statistics against this supreme occasion which
had for so many years been the most conspicuous probability before the
country. His mind leaping forwards to the conception of a great nation
reluctantly turning its vast resources to the prosecution of a righteous
defensive war, filled in the obvious corollaries of plan and
calculation. He thought that somewhere "up there" there must be people
who could count and who had counted everything that we might need for
such a struggle, and organisers who had schemed and estimated down to
practicable and manageable details....

Such lapses from knowledge to faith are perhaps necessary that human
heroism may be possible....

His conception of his own share in the great national uprising was a
very modest one. He was a writer, a footnote to reality; he had no trick
of command over men, his role was observation rather than organisation,
and he saw himself only as an insignificant individual dropping from his
individuality into his place in a great machine, taking a rifle in a
trench, guarding a bridge, filling a cartridge--just with a brassard or
something like that on--until the great task was done. Sunday night was
full of imaginat