the dreary debates, the floundering newspapers, the “bluffs,” the intrigues, the sly bargains of the week-end party, the “schoolboy honour” of grown men, the universal weak dishonesty in thinking; he thought simply of a simplified and ideal government that governed.  He thought vaguely of something behind and beyond them, England, the ruling genius of the land; something with a dignified assurance and a stable will.  He imagined this shadowy ruler miraculously provided with schemes and statistics against this supreme occasion which had for so many years been the most conspicuous probability before the country.  His mind leaping forwards to the conception of a great nation reluctantly turning its vast resources to the prosecution of a righteous defensive war, filled in the obvious corollaries of plan and calculation.  He thought that somewhere “up there” there must be people who could count and who had counted everything that we might need for such a struggle, and organisers who had schemed and estimated down to practicable and manageable details....

Such lapses from knowledge to faith are perhaps necessary that human heroism may be possible....

His conception of his own share in the great national uprising was a very modest one.  He was a writer, a footnote to reality; he had no trick of command over men, his role was observation rather than organisation, and he saw himself only as an insignificant individual dropping from his individuality into his place in a great machine, taking a rifle in a trench, guarding a bridge, filling a cartridge—­just with a brassard or something like that on—­until the great task was done.  Sunday night was full of imaginations of order, of the countryside standing up to its task, of roads cleared and resources marshalled, of the petty interests of the private life altogether set aside.  And mingling with that it was still possible for Mr. Britling, he was still young enough, to produce such dreams of personal service, of sudden emergencies swiftly and bravely met, of conspicuous daring and exceptional rewards, such dreams as hover in the brains of every imaginative recruit....

The detailed story of Mr. Britling’s two days’ search for some easy and convenient ladder into the service of his threatened country would be a voluminous one.  It would begin with the figure of a neatly brushed patriot, with an intent expression upon his intelligent face, seated in the Londonward train, reading the war news—­the first comforting war news for many days—­and trying not to look as though his life was torn up by the roots and all his being aflame with devotion; and it would conclude after forty-eight hours of fuss, inquiry, talk, waiting, telephoning, with the same gentleman, a little fagged and with a kind of weary apathy in his eyes, returning by the short cut from the station across Claverings park to resume his connection with his abandoned roots.  The essential process of the interval had been the correction of Mr. Britling’s temporary delusion that the government of the British Empire is either intelligent, instructed, or wise.