have a war for? _We_ don't want one!"

Then the boy with the newspapers appeared, and they rushed at him and
tore the papers from his bag....

"By Jove!" they said, "it's ... it's true!"

"I told you it was true. You wouldn't believe me when I told you. You
know, it's a Bit Thick, that's what it is. I've been a Liberal all my
life, same as my father ... and then this goes and happens! What _is_ a
chap to do?..."

He wailed away, filling the air with prophecies of doom and disaster.
They could hear him, as he rushed about the hotel telling the news,
taking people into corners and informing them that it was a Bit Thick.
There was something pitiful about him ... he had climbed to a
comfortable competence from a hard beginning ... and something comical,
too, something that made them all wish to laugh. The veneer of manners
which he had acquired with so much trouble had worn off in a moment, and
the careful speech, the rigid insistence on aspirates, to speak, took to
its heels. He appeared to them suddenly, carrying an atlas.

"Where the 'ell is Serbia anyway?" he demanded. "I can't find the damn
place on the map!"

2

They stood about, gaping at each other, unable to realise what had
happened to them. One of the windows of the drawing-room was open, and
the subdued buzz of women's voices came through it to the terrace.
Monotonously, exasperatingly, one querulous voice sent a fretful
question through the bewildered speeches of the women ... "But what's it
about? That's what I want to know. I've asked everybody, but nobody
seems to know!" Some one made an inaudible reply to the querulous voice,
and then it went on: "Serbia! That's what some one else said, but we
aren't Serbia. We're England, and I don't see what we've got to do with
it. If they want to go and fight, let them. That's what I say!..."

Gilbert and Henry sat in the middle of the group on the terrace,
listening to what was being said about them. They had thrown the
newspapers aside ... there was hysteria in the headlines ... and were
sitting in a sort of stupor, wondering what would happen next. The
buzzing voice, demanding to be told what the war was about, still
droned through the window, irritating them vaguely until the man who had
first brought the news got up from his seat, and went to the window and
shut it noisily.

"Damn 'er," he said, as he came back to his seat. "'Oo cares whether she
knows what it's about or not! What's it got to do with