That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the DayDehan, Richard
General
That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
Dehan, Richard
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes, summoned home by
the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged round their respective
Consulates. Prince Cheraowski, Representative of Germany, having had
his passports handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man,
lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional through St.
James’s Park. And, on the Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary a few
days later, Count Lensdorff received his walking-ticket, and gracefully
vanished from the scene. And from the hall-doors of one Embassy in
Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square, British workmen,
cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the massive brazen plates. Crowds
watched the operation in phlegmatic silence; the single individual who
loosed a "boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving majority, and
moved on by the police, while the windows of the British Embassy at
Berlin were being shattered by brickbats, as were those of divers
British consulates and Legations throughout the Fatherland. On the mud,
stones, and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like
usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we may not dwell, but I
do not think we are likely to forget.
Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and tended by
Committees and boards and Councils, became, as at the stroke of a wand,
huge training camps of young, keen, healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in
ill-fitting gingerbread or mustard-coloured clothes. How groups of
unoccupied London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres of
the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly overflow with bronzed
and sturdy warriors of the Regular Forces, and as suddenly empty again.
The platforms of railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the
public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield rifles, while
regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed on their packs, shielded
by the peaks of their tilted caps from the blue-white electric glare, or
the yellow dazzle of the morning sun. A whistle—a snort and clank of
two big locomotives—and the platforms under the reverberating glass
roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow sunshine, or the
blue-white electric glare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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