The children, looking on, partly understood the silent strength of that great armada of warships, and they went back to bed contented with their grandmother’s promise to tell them all about it to-morrow. Next morning the children ran to the window, but the British Fleet had gone, vanished as silently as it had come, and the sea was almost clear. “What has happened? Why have the ships gone?” The children pressed my friend with eager questions, and as you will also want to put the same questions, I cannot do better than tell you what she told them. The great war with Germany had begun, and the British Fleet had gone eastwards to the North Sea, there to watch for the German Fleet! But the most wonderful thing was that now, after a hundred years, British soldiers were going to fight again on the Continent. Almost exactly a hundred years ago Wellington, aided by German troops, had finally crushed Napoleon on the field of Waterloo. But now the British and the French were fast friends, and they were going to fight shoulder to shoulder against the German hosts. A great writer, who was even greater as a poet, George Meredith, wrote some noble lines on this new-found friendship. I quote one verse: “Joy that no more with murder’s frown The ancient rivals bark apart. Now Nelson to brave France is shown A hero after her own heart: And he now scanning that quick race To whom through life his glove was thrown, Would know a sister spirit to embrace.” You must never think of the past as if it were something quite different from the present. In some ways this great war brings us much nearer the glorious old England which was always at war in Flanders, as Belgium was then called. Those old heroical conflicts of long ago produced some wonderful books. Let us hope that the time will come when some great writer of the future will create as vividly real a man as Sterne’s Uncle Toby. After being wounded at the siege of Namur, Uncle Toby spent his peaceful old age in following Marlborough’s army on his bowling-green. Sterne describes how the old man set up model fortifications with batteries, saps, ditches, and palisadoes, and so, with the help of maps and books as well as of Corporal Trim, his soldier servant, he was able to fight over again, not only his old battles but those that were still going on. The Uncle Toby of the future will set up miniature pieces of artillery and tiny trenches in place of the batteries and palisadoes of the past. Let us hope, however, that he will be as noble-hearted and kindly a man as his famous predecessor. When you are older, I hope you will read and re-read this wonderful book, which is called “Tristram Shandy.” I will only add here Uncle Toby’s defence of Britain at war, because it applies so well to the present War with Germany.