There was a profound ignorance at the back of all these opinions, assertions, discussions. Fleet Street, in spite of the dogmatism of its leading articles, did not know the truth and had never searched for it with a sincerity which would lead now to a certain conviction. All its thousands of articles on the subject of our relations with Germany had been but a clash of individual opinions coloured by the traditional policy of each paper, by the prejudice of the writers and by the influence of party interests. The brain of Fleet Street was but a more intense and a more vibrant counterpart of the national psychology, which in these hours of enormous crisis was bewildered by doubt and, in spite of all its activity, incredulous of the tremendous possibility that in a few days England might be engaged in the greatest war since the Napoleonic era, fighting for her life. 6 On my own lips there was the same incredulity when I said good-bye. It was on July 29, and England had not yet picked up the gauntlet which Germany had flung into the face of European peace. "I shall be back in a few days. Armageddon is still a long way off. The idea of it is too ridiculous and too damnable!" I lay awake on the night before I left England with the credentials of a war correspondent on a roving commission, and there came into my head a vision of the hideous thing which was being hatched in the council chambers of Europe, even as the little clock ticked on my bedroom mantelpiece. I thrust back this vision of blood by old arguments, old phrases which had become the rag-tags of political writers. War with Germany? A war in which half the nations of Europe would be flung against each other in a deadly struggle--millions against millions of men belonging to the peoples of the highest civilization? No, it was inconceivable and impossible. Why should England make war upon Germany or Germany upon England? We were alike in blood and character, bound to each other by a thousand ties of tradition and knowledge and trade and friendship. All the best intellect of Germany was friendly to us. 7 In Hamburg two years ago I had listened to speeches about all that, obviously sincere, emotional in their protestations of racial comradeship. That young poet who had become my friend, who had taken me home to his house in the country and whose beautiful wife had plucked roses for me in her garden, and said in her pretty English, "I send my best love with them to England"--was he a liar when he spoke fine and stirring words about the German admiration for English literature and life, and when--it was late in the evening and we had drunk some wine--he passed his arm through mine and said, "If ever there were to be a war between our two countries I and all my friends in Hamburg would weep at the crime and the tragedy."