people. Statesmen might say that they fought for the scrap of paper, for
an outraged Belgium, because of an agreement binding Great Britain to
France; the people knew that they fought for England! And to stay at
home and wait with your eyes staring into the darkness was harder
perhaps than to stand with your back to the wall and fight. They were
black days for the watchers, those early days of the War.

The one thought affected everyone in a different way. The look in their
eyes was the same, but they used a different method of expressing it.
Dick threw himself heart and soul into his work; he could not talk about
the War or discuss how things were going on, and he was kept fairly
busy, he had little time for talking. All day he examined men; boys,
lying frankly about their age in order to get in; old men, well beyond
the limit, telling their untruths with wistful, anxious eyes. Men who
tried so hard to hide this or that infirmity, who argued if they were
not considered fit, who whitened under the blow of refusal, and went
from the room with bitten lips. From early morning till late at evening,
Dick sat there, and all day the stream of old men, young men, and boys
passed before him.

Fanny took it in quite a different way. Silence was torture to her; she
had to talk. She was afraid and desperately in earnest. The love in her
heart was poured out at the foot of this new ideal, and to Fanny,
England was typified in the soldiers. The night on which the paper boys
ran abroad shrieking their first casualty list Fanny lay face downwards
on her bed and sobbed her heart out. She visualized the troops she had
watched marching through London, their straight-held figures, their
merry faces, their laughing eyes, the songs they had shouted and
whistled haunted her mind. They had not seemed to be marching to death;
people had stood on the edge of the pavement to cheer them, and
now--"cut to pieces"--that was how the papers put it. It made her more
passionately attached to the ones that were left. It is no exaggeration
to say that quite gladly and freely Fanny would have given her life for
any--not one particular--soldier. Something of the spirit of
mother-love woke in her attitude towards them.

Down in quiet, sleepy little Wrotham the tide of war beat less
furiously. Uncle John would sometimes lose his temper completely because
the place as a whole remained so apathetic. The villagers did not do
much reading of the papers; the f