“You’ve asked me more than once what we’ve done to prevent another war,” he began. “Here’s your answer: nothing.” In the last week I had seen but a few provincial papers; I had almost forgotten the diplomatic moves that led to this check. With all the suddenness of those August days eight years before, however, I stepped out of the train at King’s Cross to learn that Great Britain was being left to fight, single-handed, for the freedom of the Straits, against a restored and rejuvenated Turkey. “This is the French reply to the Balfour note,” I said; “their revenge for our refusing to accompany them into the Ruhr.” “If you’ll be good enough to tell me what it’s all about . . .” Bertrand thundered; then he lay back, spent and very old, until I suggested calling in Fetter Lane to see the latest telegrams. There was nothing to be learned there; almost nothing to be learned when I invited myself to dine with the Crawleighs, though I remember this night with pleasure as the only one on which my father-in-law and I looked on any political problem with the same eyes. Halfway through dinner, Neave entered in service-uniform. His battalion had received its orders for Chanak; he did not know why he was going; we could not tell him. “Harington’s a cool-headed fellow,” said Crawleigh to keep his own courage up. “If he _can_ avoid a conflict . . .” I remembered the days eight years before when Jim Loring and I kept our courage up by telling each other that Sir Edward Grey would prevent war if war could be prevented. “I _still_ don’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her. “No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the same conclusion in less few words. War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and restored to fighting form by officers of the French army. “But . . . but _why_ . . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with pathetic helplessness.