ppeal now made yielded six hundred millions in a month.
It was almost as if Great Britain had ceased to be a nation and become a
family.

Nor did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink and
the temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At the
darkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tour
in a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though my
journey lay through three or four of the least industrial and most
placid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand, The
high roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; the
broad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stations
or depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the hay
crop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemed
to be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who had
nothing left to do but to wait for death.

The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote
hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the
front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered
by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large boardings on the face of
a public building recorded in golden letters the names of the townsmen
who had joined the colours. In every little shop window along the high
road to Bath there were portraits of the King, Kitchener, Jellicoe,
French, and Joffre, flanked sometimes by pictures of poor, burnt and
blackened Belgium.

On the edge of Dartmoor, in Drake's old town, Tavistock, I saw a
thrilling sight--thrilling yet simple and quite familiar. Eight hundred
men were leaving for France. In the cool of the evening they drew up
with their band, four square in the market-place under the grey walls of
the parish church, a thousand years old. The men of a regiment remaining
behind had come to see their comrades off, bringing their own band
with them. For a short half-hour the two bands played alternately,
"Tipperary," "Fall In," "We Don't want to Lose You," and all the other
homely but stirring ditties with which Tommy has cheered his soul. The
open windows round the square were full of faces, the balconies were
crowded, and some of the townspeople were perched on the housetops.
Suddenly the church clock struck eight, the hour for departure; a bugle
sounded; a loud voice gave the word of command like a shot out of a
musket; it