The unclean and vampirish spirit of war has swept them back to the habits of the cave-dwelling ages of the race. In an hour the culture so painfully acquired in slow generations has been swept away. Royalty, in the tearoom of the "Four Seasons," is one with the blonde nude female who romped and fought in the dark Teutonic forests ere Caesar came through Gaul. Reversal to barbarism. War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect, hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress--she the good mother, the housewife, the fond grandmother--garmented from head to foot in cloth the color of blood. Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war. II. 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 ironmongery, 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.