Empire. Yet nobody would believe him when he told it, however
fervently. My editor would not believe him, and none of his words
were published, in my paper or any other. But sometimes I used to
remember him and wonder whether perhaps in all such warnings that
came to us there were not a horrible truth which one day, when
brutally revealed, would make a mockery of all those men in England
who pooh-poohed the peril, and of the idealists who believed that
friendly relations with Germany could be secured by friendly words.
Meanwhile the Foreign Office did not reveal its secrets or give any
clear guidance to the people as to perils or policy--to the people who
would pay in blood for ignorance.


10


When I stood on the deck of the Channel boat in Dover Harbour
looking back on England, whose white cliffs gleamed faintly through
the darkness, a sense of tragic certainty came to me that a summons
of war would come to England, asking for her manhood. Perhaps it
would come to-night. The second mate of the boat came to the side
of the steamer and stared across the inky waters, on which there
were shifting pathways of white radiance, as the searchlights of
distant warships swept the sea.

"God!" he said, in a low voice.

"Do you think it will come to-night?" I asked, in the same tone of
voice. We spoke as though our words were dangerous.