e hot answer that
shattered Gresham's bluffing for ever took shape and waited. And all over
Asia, and the ocean, and the south, the air and the wires were throbbing
with their warnings to prepare--prepare.

"No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with
all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe most
people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and shouting
charges and triumphs and flags and bands--in a time when half the world
drew its food-supply from regions ten thousand miles away----"

The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his face was
intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station, a string of
loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage shot by the
carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise, echoing the
tumult of the train.

"After that," he said, "I dreamt often. For three weeks of nights that
dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I could
not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in _this_ accursed life; and
_there_--somewhere lost to me--things were happening--momentous,
terrible things... I lived at nights--my days, my waking days, this life
I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover
of the book."

He thought.

"I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream, but as to
what I did in the daytime--no. I could not tell--I do not remember. My
memory--my memory has gone. The business of life slips from me--"

He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long time he
said nothing.

"And then?" said I.

"The war burst like a hurricane."

He stared before him at unspeakable things.

"And then?" I urged again.

"One touch of unreality," he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks to
himself, "and they would have been nightmares. But they were not
nightmares--they were not nightmares. _No_!"

He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a danger
of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again in the same
tone of questioning self-communion.

"What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would touch
Capri--I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it all, as the contrast
to it all; but two nights after the whole place was shouting and bawling,
every woman almost and every other man wore a badge--Gresham's badge--and
there was no music but a jangling