Remember how upon the great grey canvas of London, broadly splashed in with khaki, from the becoming dead-leaf of the Regular troops to the deadly ginger of the newly mobilised Reserve or the hideous mustard-yellow of the latest recruit to the newest Territorial unit—Recruiting posters of every shape, size, and method of appeal to patriotism, suddenly flared out, ranging from the immemorial red-and-blue printing on white to the huge pictorial hoarding-plaster in monochrome. Dash in as values the glow of re-awakened patriotism, the resounding silences in which Royal Messages to British Citizens and lieges were delivered by grave officials in scarlet gowns and curly white wigs, and the singing of the National Anthem by huge crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, to cheer, over and over again the King, the Queen, and the Heir to the British Throne.
Recall how keenly-curious Britons densely thronged the neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament, eager to ascertain the British attitude towards France and other Continental Powers; while immense aggregations of people blocked the entrance to Downing Street, surging outside the wrought-iron screens protecting Ministerial windows; congesting Whitehall until omnibuses proceeded at a snail's pace.
Revive the strange newness of things, the snap and tingle of seeing not only Royal Palaces and Government Offices, but vital places such as Arsenals, Docks, Railway, and Electric Power stations, Powder-magazines and Munition Stores closely guarded by men in tea-leaf or ginger-brown. Sickly the hot flush of things so new with the pale dread of ruin, the ugly rumours of Invasion. Shadow in broad and black, a panic on the Stock Exchange, the dizzying fall of prices on Continental Bourses, the record slump on Wall Street, the frenzied stampede of the run upon the Banks, the Proclamation from the steps of the Royal Exchange of the strange thing called by nearly everybody—anything but a Moratorium; as, for example, a Monatorial, a Monoroarium or Honorarium, and so on.
Who could ever forget the excitement attendant on the sailing of famous passenger and cargo-liners with quick-firers and Maxims nosing through steel shields abaft the lower bridge? How the Red Cross notified its surgeons, nurses, and ambulance-helpers to hold themselves ready for business, and a neat khaki rig-out that had puzzled us in several unfamiliar details, turned out to be the Service uniform of the Royal Flying Corps.
German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes, summoned home by the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged round their respective Consulates. Prince Cheraowski, Representative of Germany, having had his passports handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man, lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional through St. James's Park. And, on the Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary a few days later, Count Lensdorff received his walking-ticket, and gracefully vanished from the scene. And from the hall-doors of one Embassy in Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square, British workmen, cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the massive brazen plates. Crowds watched the operation in phlegmatic silence; the single individual who loosed a "boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving majority, and moved on by the police, while the windows of the British Embassy at Berlin were being shattered by brickbats, as were those of divers British consulates and Legations throughout the Fatherland. On the mud, stones, and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we may not dwell, but I do not think we are likely to forget.
Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and tended by Committees and boards and Councils, became, as at the stroke of a wand, huge training camps of young, keen, healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in ill-fitting gingerbread or mustard-coloured clothes. How groups of unoccupied London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres of the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly overflow with bronzed and sturdy warriors of the Regular Forces, and as suddenly empty again. The platforms of railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield rifles, while regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed on their packs, shielded by the peaks of their tilted caps from the blue-white electric glare, or the yellow dazzle of the morning sun. A whistle—a snort and clank of two big locomotives—and the platforms under the reverberating glass roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow sunshine, or the blue-white electric glare.
Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those huge shrieking headlines, the trotting of innumerable iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless rolling of iron-shod wheels, the clatter and vibration of huge motor-lorries, vans, and waggons commandeered for the use of the Auxiliary Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump's Curative Saline, or Bango's Extract of Beef), mingled with the steady tramp of marching men, all through the days and nights. By night you lay and listened to these sounds, mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep, and the bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black, awful River, whose ice-cold woe-waters—sprung from some mysterious source—swept through our villages and towns and cities, carrying with them millions of lives, brute and human, towards the blood-red dawn of Death.