I've always believed that if there's a good job to be done in the world,
it'll get done by somebody. If this chap fails to do it, it'll be done
by some other chap.... Will you come into Holyhead with me and enquire
about trains? There's a rumour that a whole lot of them have been taken
off. They're shifting troops about...."

6

Gilbert was to travel by the Irish mail the next day. He had made up his
mind definitely to go to London and enlist, and Henry, having failed to
dissuade him from his decision, resolved to go to London with him. They
had talked about the war all day, insisting to each other that it could
not be of long duration. There was a while, during the first two or
three days' fighting, when the Germans seemed to have been held by the
Belgians, that they had the wildest hopes. "If the Belgians can keep
them back, what will happen when the French and British get at them?"
But that time of jubilee hope did not last long, and again the air was
full of rumours of disaster and misfortune. The Black Watch had been cut
to pieces....

There was a sense of fear in every heart, not of physical cowardice, but
of doubt of the stability of things. This horrible disaster had been
foretold many times, so frequently, indeed, that it had become a joke,
and novelists had written horrific accounts of the ills that would
swiftly follow after the outbreak of hostilities. Credit would disappear
... and all that pretence at wealth, the pieces of paper and the scrips
and shares, would be revealed at last as ... pieces of paper. Silver,
even, would be treated with contempt, and there would be a scramble for
gold. And people would begin to hoard things ... and no one would trust
any one else. There would be suspicion and fear and greed and hate ...
and very swiftly and very surely, civilisation would reel and topple and
fall to pieces.... At any moment that might happen. So far, indeed,
things were still steady ... calamity had not come so quickly as
imaginative men had foretold ... but presently, when the slums ... the
rich man's reproach ... had become hungrier than they usually were,
there would be rioting ... and killing.... One began to be frightfully
conscious of the slums ... and the rage of desperate, starving people.
One imagined the obsessing thought in each mind: _Here we are, eating
and drinking and being waited upon ... and perhaps to-morrow!..._

But no one, in forecasting the European Disaster, had made allowa