joyment of a Bank
Holiday.

The launch reached the battleship, was hoisted and stowed on board.
Almost immediately a long line of signal flags fluttered from the
squat mast. Smoke began to pour from the funnels. The flags were
hauled down and another festoon of them was hoisted in their place. I
could see an answering stream of flags fluttering from one of the
ships further out.

Then, very slowly, the great steamer began to move. She went at a
snail's pace, as it seemed to me, across the lough to the County Down
coast. Very slowly she swept round in a wide circle and steamed back
again northward. There was something terrifying in the stately
deliberation with which she moved. It was as if some great beast of
prey paced as a sentinel in front of his victim, so conscious of his
power to seize and kill that he could afford to wait before he sprang.

The crowd behind us was silent now. The laughter and the play had
ceased. Children were crowding round the women seeking for hands to
hold. Some of the women, vaguely terror-stricken, looked into the
faces of the men. Others had drawn a little apart from the rest of the
crowd and stood in a group by themselves, staring out at the
battleship. There were middle-aged women and quite young women in this
group. I raised my field-glasses and scanned their faces. There was
one expression on them, and only one--not fear, but hatred. Women
fight sometimes in citizen armies when such things have been called
into existence. But it is not their fighting power which makes them
important. That is, probably, always quite inconsiderable. What makes
them a force to be reckoned with in war is their faculty for hating.
They hate with more concentration and intensity than men do. These
women were mindful, perhaps, of the girl with the baby whom Clithering
had seen shot. They realized, perhaps, the menace for husbands,
lovers, and sons which lay in the guns of the black ironclad parading
sluggishly before their eyes. Remembering and anticipating death, they
hated the source of it with uncompromising bitterness. The men in the
crowd seemed crushed into silence by mere wonder and expectation of
some unknown thing. They were not, so far as I could judge, afraid.
They were not excited. They simply waited to see what was to happen to
them and their town.

Once more a string of flags fluttered from the ship's mast. Once more
the answer came from her consorts. Then for the third time she swept
roun