East Anglian agricultural labourers were in revolt, and the building trade throughout the country was on the verge of a lockout.  Russia seemed to be in the crisis of a social revolution.  From Baku to St. Petersburg there were insurrectionary movements in the towns, and on the 23rd—­the very day of the Austrian ultimatum—­Cossacks were storming barbed wire entanglements in the streets of the capital.  The London Stock Exchange was in a state of panic disorganisation because of a vast mysterious selling of securities from abroad.  And France, France it seemed was lost to all other consideration in the enthralling confrontations and denunciations of the Caillaux murder trial, the trial of the wife of her ex-prime Minister for the murder of a blackmailing journalist.  It was a case full of the vulgarest sexual violence.  Before so piquant a spectacle France it seemed could have no time nor attention for the revelation of M. Humbert, the Reporter of the Army Committee, proclaiming that the artillery was short of ammunition, that her infantry had boots “thirty years old” and not enough of those....

Such were the appearances of things.  Can it be wondered if it seemed to the German mind that the moment for the triumphant assertion of the German predominance in the world had come?  A day or so before the Dublin shooting, the murder of Sarajevo had been dragged again into the foreground of the world’s affairs by an ultimatum from Austria to Serbia of the extremest violence.  From the hour when the ultimatum was discharged the way to Armageddon lay wide and unavoidable before the feet of Europe.  After the Dublin conflict there was no turning back.  For a week Europe was occupied by proceedings that were little more than the recital of a formula.  Austria could not withdraw her unqualified threats without admitting error and defeat, Russia could not desert Serbia without disgrace, Germany stood behind Austria, France was bound to Russia by a long confederacy of mutual support, and it was impossible for England to witness the destruction of France or the further strengthening of a loud and threatening rival.  It may be that Germany counted on Russia giving way to her, it may be she counted on the indecisions and feeble perplexities of England, both these possibilities were in the reckoning, but chiefly she counted on war.  She counted on war, and since no nation in all the world had ever been so fully prepared in every way for war as she was, she also counted on victory.

One writes “Germany.”  That is how one writes of nations, as though they had single brains and single purposes.  But indeed while Mr. Britling lay awake and thought of his son and Lady Frensham and his smashed automobile and Mrs. Harrowdean’s trick of abusive letter-writing and of God and evil and a thousand perplexities, a multitude of other brains must also have been busy, lying also in beds or sitting in studies or watching in guard-rooms or chatting belatedly in cafes or smoking-rooms or pacing the