It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had called up.  They were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent in their clinging air of the grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity of old hopes.

“Let’s go back to the hotel, my boy,” I said.  “It’s getting late.”

It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that night of a possible war.  For the next two days I went about amongst my fellow men, who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness, but unanimously derided my fears of a war.  They would not believe in it.  It was impossible.  On the evening of the second day I was in the hotel’s smoking room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few choice minds of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more hushed than any club reading-room I have ever been in.  Gathered into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued tones suitable to the genius of the place.

A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an impatient finger in my direction and apostrophised me.

“What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would come in.”

The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without faltering.

“Most assuredly.  I should think all Europe knows that by this time.”

He took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a slight jerk for greater emphasis, said forcibly: 

“Then, if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can be no war.  Germany won’t be so mad as that.”

On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum.  The day after came the declaration of war, and the Austrian mobilisation order.  We were fairly caught.  All that remained for me to do was to get my party out of the way of eventual shells.  The best move which occurred to me was to snatch them up instantly into the mountains to a Polish health resort of great repute—­which I did (at the rate of one hundred miles in eleven hours) by the last civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks.

And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland, not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain the permission to travel by train, or road.  It was a wonderful, a poignant two months.  This is not the time, and, perhaps, not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust anyone, to appeal to anyone, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope and even of its last illusions, and unable, in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences, to take refuge in stoical acceptance.  I have seen all this.  And I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words:  Ruin—­and Extinction.