Mr. Britling thought there were a few little obstacles.
“I’ve seen the new British army drilling in London, Mr. Britling. I don’t know if you have. I saw a whole battalion. And they hadn’t got half-a-dozen uniforms, and not a single rifle to the whole battalion.
“You don’t begin to realise in England what you are up against. You have no idea what it means to be in a country where everybody, the women, the elderly people, the steady middle-aged men, are taking war as seriously as business. They haven’t the slightest compunction. I don’t know what Germany was like before the war, I had hardly gotten out of my train before the war began; but Germany today is one big armed camp. It’s all crawling with soldiers. And every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his kit.
“And they’re as sure of winning as if they had got London now. They mean to get London. They’re cocksure they are going to walk through Belgium, cocksure they will get to Paris by Sedan day, and then they are going to destroy your fleet with zeppelins and submarines and make a dash across the Channel. They say it’s England they are after, in this invasion of Belgium. They’ll just down France by the way. They say they’ve got guns to bombard Dover from Calais. They make a boast of it. They know for certain you can’t arm your troops. They know you can’t turn out ten thousand rifles a week. They come and talk to anyone in the trains, and explain just how your defeat is going to be managed. It’s just as though they were talking of rounding up cattle.”
Mr. Britling said they would soon be disillusioned.
Mr. Direck, with the confidence of his authentic observations, remarked after a perceptible interval, “I wonder how.”
He reverted to the fact that had most struck upon his imagination.
“Grownup people, ordinary intelligent experienced people, taking war seriously, talking of punishing England; it’s a revelation. A sort of solemn enthusiasm. High and low. …
“And the trainloads of men and the trainloads of guns. …”
“Liège,” said Mr. Britling.
“Liège was just a scratch on the paint,” said Mr. Direck. “A few thousand dead, a few score thousand dead, doesn’t matter—not a red cent to them. There’s a man arrived at the Cecil who saw them marching into Brussels. He sat at table with me at lunch yesterday. All day it went on, a vast unending river of men in grey. Endless wagons, endless guns, the whole manhood of a nation and all its stuff, marching. …
“I thought war,” said Mr. Direck, “was a thing when most people stood about and did the shouting, and a sort of special team did the fighting. Well, Germany isn’t fighting like that. … I confess it, I’m scared. … It’s the very biggest thing on record; it’s the very limit in wars. … I dreamt last night of a grey flood washing everything in front of it. You and me—and Miss Corner—curious thing, isn’t it? that she came into it—were scrambling up a hill higher and higher, with that flood pouring after us. Sort of splashing into a foam of faces and helmets and bayonets—and clutching hands—and red stuff. … Well, Mr. Britling, I admit I’m a little bit overwrought about it, but I can assure you you don’t begin to realise in England what it is you’ve butted against. …”
§ 15
Cissie did not come up to the Dower House that afternoon, and so Mr. Direck, after some vague and transparent excuses, made his way to the cottage.
Here his report become even more impressive. Teddy sat on the writing desk beside the typewriter and swung his legs slowly. Letty brooded in the armchair. Cissie presided over certain limited crawling operations of the young heir.
“They could have the equal of the whole British Army killed three times over and scarcely know it had happened. They’re all in it. It’s a whole country in arms.”
Teddy nodded thoughtfully.
“There’s our fleet,” said Letty.
“Well, that won’t save Paris, will it?”
Mr. Direck didn’t, he declared, want to make disagreeable talk, but this was a thing people in England had to face. He felt like one of them himself—“naturally.” He’d sort of hurried home to them—it was just like hurrying home—to tell them of the tremendous thing that was going to hit them. He felt like a man in front of a flood, a great grey flood. He couldn’t hide what he had been thinking. “Where’s our army?” asked Letty suddenly.
“Lost somewhere in France,” said Teddy. “Like a needle in a bottle of hay.”
“What I keep on worrying at is this,” Mr. Direck resumed. “Suppose they did come, suppose somehow they scrambled over, sixty or seventy thousand men perhaps.”
“Every man would turn out and take a shot at them,”
