No one was more innocent than I of the impending horror. In fact, this menacing “armed camp” actually seemed to bristle in less sharply defined lines when seen at close range. Public opinion seemed far less violent than I had expected. In England there was the persistent hostility to Compulsory Service, the gnawing compunction at the folly of the Boer War, the complete subsidence of the panic over German invasion. In France, there was the unyielding opposition to the new three-years’ military law, culminating in the radical victory at the April parliamentary elections, a clear national expression of reluctance at the increased military expenditures; there was the superb irony of the French press over the Zabern affair, where one would have expected a raging chauvinism; there was the general public deprecation of the activities of the royalists, and the constant discrediting of their Alsace-Lorraine propaganda. In Italy I had seen the wild outburst of reaction against the criminal Tripolitan war, and the great general strike of June, a direct popular uprising against war and militarism. Perhaps if I had spent the winter in Germany, I should have felt the drift towards war, but even there all the opinion I heard was of some gigantic slow-moving Slavic pressure, against which defence must be made. And if public and press were full of blatant world-defiance, the spirit certainly escaped my attention. My mind became quite reconciled to the fact of “armed peace.” My imagination unconsciously began to envisage armaments as mere frozen symbols of power, grim, menacing and costly, yet little more than graphic expressions, in a language that all the world could understand, of the relative strength and prestige of the nations. In spite of the uniforms that sprinkled the sidewalks and the wagon-trains that littered the streets, my imagination simply refused to take them as dynamic. And there was little in press and people to make me think that they themselves took them as dynamic. How I should have acted if I had known of the imminence of the world-war I do not know, but in the light of the event my rambles and interests take on the aspect of the toddlings of an innocent child about the edge of a volcano’s crater.