“A double-headed mad dog,” said Aunt Wilshire.  “Him and his eagles!...  A man like that ought never to have been allowed to make a war....  Not even a little war....  If he had been put under restraint when I said so, none of these things would have happened.  But, of course I am nobody....  It was not considered worth attending to.”

Section 10

One remarkable aspect of the English attitude towards the war was the disposition to treat it as a monstrous joke.  It is a disposition traceable in a vast proportion of the British literature of the time.  In spite of violence, cruelty, injustice, and the vast destruction and still vaster dangers of the struggles, that disposition held.  The English mind refused flatly to see anything magnificent or terrible in the German attack, or to regard the German Emperor or the Crown Prince as anything more than figures of fun.  From first to last their conception of the enemy was an overstrenuous, foolish man, red with effort, with protruding eyes and a forced frightfulness of demeanour.  That he might be tremendously lethal did not in the least obscure the fact that he was essentially ridiculous.  And if as the war went on the joke grew grimmer, still it remained a joke.  The German might make a desert of the world; that could not alter the British conviction that he was making a fool of himself.

And this disposition kept coming to the surface throughout the afternoon, now in a casual allusion, now in some deliberate jest.  The small boys had discovered the goose step, and it filled their little souls with amazement and delight.  That human beings should consent to those ridiculous paces seemed to them almost incredibly funny.  They tried it themselves, and then set out upon a goose-step propaganda.  Letty and Cissie had come up to the Dower House for tea and news, and they were enrolled with Teddy and Hugh.  The six of them, chuckling and swaying, marched, in vast scissor strides across the lawn.  “Left,” cried Hugh.  “Left.”

“Toes out more,” said Mr. Lawrence Carmine.

“Keep stiffer,” said the youngest Britling.

“Watch the Zeppelins and look proud,” said Hugh.  “With the chest out. Zo!”

Mrs. Britling was so much amused that she went in for her camera, and took a snapshot of the detachment.  It was a very successful snapshot, and a year later Mr. Britling was to find a print of it among his papers, and recall the sunshine and the merriment....

Section 11