Prussia extended from the Baltic to the Danube. The whole of Central Europe was one vast cesspool, in which all things good were cast to deliquesce in putrefaction, while over it floated supreme the livid miasma of Prussianism. In some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world was struggling. But there was the other side of the world’s embattled hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. England’s Navy—yes. He had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility. But the British Army? A glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from Cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of Empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of the Continent of Europe. And now he learned, to his stupefaction, that the British Empire, calling up all her sons from within those same far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three greatest military powers in the world. The casualties alone exceeded the total strength of the original British Army serving with the colours. The Army now was an organization of millions. Where had they come from? His three interpreters of the outer world gave him information according to their respective lights. All the early gathering of the hosts had been voluntary enlistments. The armies springing up at Lord Kitchener’s call had been labelled numerically by his magic name. Only recently had we been driven to conscription. And Kitchener himself—the only great soldier of whom he had ever heard? Drowned in the _Hampshire_ last June. . . . Then again the revolution in national life—the paper currency, the darkened streets of towns, the licensing laws—further excited his throbbing curiosity. He remembered with a spasm almost of remorse the few signs and tokens of war which had reached him and passed unheeded; the National Registration, which he had resented as a bureaucratic impertinence; the mad taxation of income which he had regarded as evidence of England’s decay. . . . “Has ever man been such a fool as I, since the world began?” The hard-headed doctor to whom this rhetorical question was addressed, replied: “I can’t recall an instance.” When driven to contemplation of his own isolation, he reflected that all the time there had been a living link between himself and this upheaved world. Every week, rain or fine, through snow or dust, Quong Ho had visited the little town. “When did the news of the war become general in Water-End?” he asked.