Which it wasn't, he reflected, setting down his cup and beginning to roll a cigarette ... not by a long shot; and remained silent yet a little longer, marvelling at the extraordinary triviality of such things as war, against the sombre verities of Race and Love and Despair. And then he suddenly became aware that the shoes had been again softly discarded, and he heard the creak of the trestles as the navigating officer stretched himself on his camp-bed alongside the hand-steering gear. Rolling a cigarette Mr. Spenlove began again. "I doubt if you can conceive now," he remarked, "how that bland announcement of a possible war before morning startled and shocked me. I doubt if anybody realizes how such things tore our hearts before those autumn days in nineteen fourteen. Some of you may remember when war was declared between England and the Boer Republics. Quite a little thrill in London; a romantic feeling that the die was cast, and all that sort of thing. But that was far away across the sea, a diminutive business which it pleased us to consider one of our punitive expeditions. War, the collision of European hosts, was a subject for literature and art. It wouldn't ever happen again. The Turks and Italians had been at war and it had been a decorous affair involving some nebulous actions in Cyrenaica--a locality we had never heard of before--and a few amusing incidents at sea. I remember we were pursued all one morning by an indignant Italian scout-ship during that war, who wanted to know why we hadn't stopped at her signal. I believe, as a matter of fact, the mate on the bridge had been making himself a hammock and hadn't seen anything. And when they did catch us up our skipper simply broke out the Red Ensign, showed his codeflags, and went ahead. War? We hadn't any conception of what the word meant. Our troops were always walloping some tribe or other in India and so forth, and we lived in a peaceful, orderly world.