ted machine of civilization. Everything stopped.

That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it
was.

Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing.
I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral State. I had money in a
bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A
hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the
railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note.
What had seemed money was not money.

Values were told in terms of bread.

It was a swift and immediate return to the economic conditions of
barbarism. Metals were hoarded; and where there had been trade there was
barter. And it all happened in an hour, in that first fierce panic of
war.

Traffic stopped with a clang as of rusty iron. The mailed fist had
dislocated the complex machinery of European traffic. Frontiers which
had been mere landmarks of travel became suddenly formidable and
impassable barriers, guarded by harsh, hysterical men with bayonets.

War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbish! It fills them with the
cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of
battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the
German frontier--and I dare say every other frontier--in the first
stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St.
Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in ironmongery, with shaved
heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not
because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were
hysterical. The fact is worth noting.

It explains many a bloody and infamous deed in the tragic history of sad
Alsace and of little Belgium. The war-begotten reversal to savagery
brought with it all the hysteria of the savage man. The sentries at St.
Ludwig struck with muskets and sabres because they were hysterical with
terror of the new, unknown state into which they had been plunged, not
because they were not men like you and me. Surely the savage Uhlan who
ravaged the cottages of Alsace was your brother and mine, and the Magyar
beyond the Danube and the Cossack at Kovna. Only they had gone back to
the terrors of the man who dwelt in a cave.

Traffic stopped; and when it stopped civilization fell away from the
travelers. That was strange. Take the afternoon of the day war was
declared, the date being Aug. 1, in the year of our Lord 1914, and the
hour 7: