nations. "Put down those
weapons and listen to me," so the church should speak in irresistible
tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.

Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments,
and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.

(7)

And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave
danger in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the
interests of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an
example--which unhappily was not very widely followed--by abstaining
from alcohol during the continuance of the struggle. It did however
swing over the Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete
abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding
comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and
heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium,
and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
cigarette--just one cigarette.

The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became
his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.

It brought him low.

The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.

The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world
more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of
ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the
enormous background of the world war, by his ineffective realization
of vast national needs, by his passionate desire, for himself and his
church, not to be ineffective.

The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of
dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts.
The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the
Maine, the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically,
and justly, and everything be as it had been before--but pleasanter,
gave place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp
and the doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed
terribly upon the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of
Zeppelins presently raining