It is not the least arresting of those many portents accompanying the Great War that in its first week, for the first time in human history, the port of London was paralysed.
And so back to the Forelands, and the run between the Kentish corner and the Goodwin Sands, with a few kind words to Saint Augustine, and Julius Caesar, and the men that murdered Saint Thomas, and so grew tails, and such others as have landed at this turn of the coast; but none for Hengist and Horsa, who never lived at all, and yet have done all manner of harm. So through the Downs into the Channel again and back on my way to the sea of Sussex, and to the shores which may be drowned and swamped for a while by alien townsmen, but will keep their own counsel and in due time will rise again.
We brought up as night fell under the shelter of Folkestone Breakwater. It had fallen almost calm as we slid into the oily place under the darkness, and there was a long exasperating swell, not regular, but coming in stupidly from the southeast, whence no wind blew, and washing back from the stones of the pier. A drizzling rain also was falling and, in general, my companion and I paid for the splendour of those last days round the corner of Kent and across the Thames. It was too early to sleep and, as I had had the helm the night before, I had slept also during the day. I sat looking at my main chart, though I knew every inch (oh! come! say rather millimetres) of the coast I was to follow; and I pondered upon that shoreline of Kent and Sussex, and upon places which I had passed far off on my way eastward, and which I would now see from closer by as I stood down-Channel on my westward journey home.
How well (too well? … No) does a man get to know a bit of coast like this between Selsea and the Downs after half a life of lazy passages along it, and (to be just) sometimes of wicked winds! It becomes as familiar as a street; not only the aspect of the shore—changeable as that is—not only lights and buoys, and the hours for the turn of tides and all the rest of it, but the very sea itself in spite of its innumerable diversity.
But one effect of this familiarity is odd and unexpected—I know not whether others have felt it; I have felt it profoundly (especially in the last few years)—and that is, the way in which the sameness of the sea, the reiteration at sea of similar emotions, of similar heights and bearing-marks of the coast, the unity of scene, of time, of action, the eternity of the sea, throw into relief the catastrophic change, the cataract of change, inland: the revolution which has transformed modern England; so that, of all the states I know, none has become so intimately different from its own immediate past, within the memory of men elderly, but not yet old, as England: yes, even South England: the refuge.
To many I know this is a cause of rejoicing. Worse things have given way to better in their eyes. To others it is a despair; they are of that temperament which can only repose in fixed sanctities. For my part, it is to me a regret. Because the change is unhappy, and happiness is the end of man.
The older England I knew (the spirit of which has almost disappeared) was a happier place; happier not only in the immediate elements of personal happiness, but in the more distant elements of corporate happiness, such as national pride and security. Yet some find the change to be good: so they do.
At any rate, in this mixture of good and evil, the thing that we should note—the thing the historian will note with amazement—is the profundity and the rapidity of the change.
There stand the same marks, the same headlands, which I knew as a boy; the sight to landward is very little changed. There are the same three forts of Spithead, through which I used to set out from the sheltered water. There is the same odd entry, somewhat shoal and difficult, to the branches of Chichester Harbour and Bosham, that famous hamlet in the story of England. There is the low shelf of Selsea Bill, and the mark on the Mixen, and the two buoys of the Looe Stream, and the Owers Light winking outside—as I remember it winking when I watched it, a little boy, from the height of the Downs. The entry to Littlehampton is the same, and to Shoreham. The breakwater at Newhaven, though it still seems new to me, is already old. Beachy Head Light, which used to be on the summit of the cliff, has been shifted to the beach below. The breakwater at Hastings has failed, but Fairlight gives you the same marks; and the entry to Rye is what it always was, a caution to camels who have passed with honours through the eyes of needles. Dungeness slowly crawling out to sea still seems the same. The only material change in all that passage is the dangerous failure called Dover Harbour, against which the rushing tide
