lowed peremptory details of instructions as to the supplies
which every householder must furnish for the German soldiers quartered
in his neighbourhood, and an announcement as to the supreme and
inviolable authority of the German officer in command of any given
place.

Nothing else yet published brought home to the public the realization of
what had happened as did this coldly pompous and, in the circumstances,
very brutal proclamation. And no item in it so bit into the hearts of
the bewildered Londoners who read it as did the clear incisive statement
to the effect that a British subject who wore no military uniform would
be shot like a dog if he raised a hand in the defence of his country or
his home. He must receive the invader with open arms, and provide him
food, lodging, and assistance of every kind, or be led out and shot.
There were hundreds of thousands of men in London that day who would
have given very much for the right to wear a uniform which they had
learned almost to despise of late years; a uniform many of them had
wished to abolish altogether, as the badge of a primitive and barbarous
trade, a "hellish art."

We had talked glibly enough of war, of its impossibility in England, and
of the childish savagery of the appeal to arms; just as, a few years
earlier, before the naval reductions, we had talked of England's
inviolability, secured her by her unquestioned mastery of the sea. We
had written and spoken hundreds of thousands of fine words upon these
subjects; and, within the last forty-eight hours, we had demonstrated
with great energy the needlessness of armed forces for England. For and
against, about it and about, we had woven a mazy network of windy
platitudes and catch-phrases, all devised to hide the manifest and
manly duties of citizenship; all intended to justify the individual's
exclusive concentration upon his own personal pleasures and
aggrandizement, without waste of time or energy upon any claims of the
commonwealth.

And now, in a few score of short, sharp words, in a single brief
document, peremptorily addressed to the fifty million people of these
islands, a German soldier had brought an end to all our vapourings, all
our smug, self-interested theories, and shattered the monstrous fabric
of our complaisance, as it were, with a rattle of his sword-hilt. Never
before in history had a people's vanity been so shaken by a word.

In the early afternoon an unavoidable errand took me to a nor