Nothing else yet published brought home to the public the realization of what had happened as did this coldly pompous and, in the circumstances, very brutal proclamation. And no item in it so bit into the hearts of the bewildered Londoners who read it as did the clear incisive statement to the effect that a British subject who wore no military uniform would be shot like a dog if he raised a hand in the defence of his country or his home. He must receive the invader with open arms, and provide him food, lodging, and assistance of every kind, or be led out and shot. There were hundreds of thousands of men in London that day who would have given very much for the right to wear a uniform which they had learned almost to despise of late years; a uniform many of them had wished to abolish altogether, as the badge of a primitive and barbarous trade, a "hellish art." We had talked glibly enough of war, of its impossibility in England, and of the childish savagery of the appeal to arms; just as, a few years earlier, before the naval reductions, we had talked of England's inviolability, secured her by her unquestioned mastery of the sea. We had written and spoken hundreds of thousands of fine words upon these subjects; and, within the last forty-eight hours, we had demonstrated with great energy the needlessness of armed forces for England. For and against, about it and about, we had woven a mazy network of windy platitudes and catch-phrases, all devised to hide the manifest and manly duties of citizenship; all intended to justify the individual's exclusive concentration upon his own personal pleasures and aggrandizement, without waste of time or energy upon any claims of the commonwealth. And now, in a few score of short, sharp words, in a single brief document, peremptorily addressed to the fifty million people of these islands, a German soldier had brought an end to all our vapourings, all our smug, self-interested theories, and shattered the monstrous fabric of our complaisance, as it were, with a rattle of his sword-hilt. Never before in history had a people's vanity been so shaken by a word. In the early afternoon an unavoidable errand took me to a northeastern suburb. I made my return to town as one among an army of refugees. The people had begun flocking into London from as far north and east as Brentwood. The Great Eastern Railway was disorganized. The northern highways leading into London were occupied by unbroken lines of people journeying into the city for protection--afoot, in motor-cars, on cycles, and in every kind of horse-drawn vehicle, and carrying with them the strangest assortment of personal belongings. At the earliest possible hour I made my way toward South Kensington. I told myself there might be something I could do for Constance Grey. Beyond that there was the fact that I craved another sight of her, and I longed to hear her comment when she knew I had finished with _The Mass_.