BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION There was war; and the whole machinery of civilization stopped. Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all falls apart into muddle and ruin. The declaration of war was like thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped. That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it was. Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing. I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral state. I had money in a bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note. What had seemed money was not money. Values were told in terms of bread. It was a swift and immediate return to the economic conditions of barbarism. Metals were hoarded; and where there had been trade there was barter. And it all happened in an hour, in that first fierce panic of war. Traffic stopped with a clang as of rusty iron. The mailed fist had dislocated the complex machinery of European traffic. Frontiers which had been mere landmarks of travel became suddenly formidable and impassable barriers, guarded by harsh, hysterical men with bayonets. War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbish! It fills them with the cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the German frontier--and I dare say every other frontier--in the first stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St. Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in iron-mongery, with shaved heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were hysterical. The fact is worth noting. It explains many a bloody and infamous deed in the tragic history of sad Alsace and of little Belgium. The war-begotten reversal to savagery brought with it all the hysteria of the savage man. The sentries at St. Ludwig struck with muskets and sabres because they were hysterical with terror of the new, unknown state into which they had been plunged, not because they were not men like you and me. Surely the savage Uhlan who ravaged the cottages of Alsace was your brother and mine, as were the Magyar beyond the Danube and the Cossack at Kovna. Only they had gone back to the terrors of the man who dwelt in a cave.