Excellency has informed my American publishers since that a week later orders
were issued to have us detained till the end of the war. However, we effected
our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a
Dutch mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of call.
On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had
not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw the signs of it in the
emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the misty glimpse in the
Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of
British submarines in the Channel. Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag
dotted the narrow waters, and two Naval officers coming on board off the South
Foreland, piloted the ship through the Downs.
The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life. But what
were to me now the futilities of an individual past? As our ship’s head swung
into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the
air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear found its way straight
into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my
wife’s eyes. She also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey
distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of
Flanders—shaping the future.
FIRST NEWS—1918
Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the town of Cracow, Austrian
Poland, nobody would believe that the war was coming. My apprehensions were
met by the words: “We have had these scares before.” This incredulity was so
universal amongst people of intelligence and information, that even I, who had
accustomed myself to look at the inevitable for years past, felt my conviction
shaken. At that time, it must be noted, the Austrian army was already partly
mobilised, and as we came through Austrian Silesia we had noticed all the
bridges being guarded by soldiers.
“Austria will back down,” was the opinion of all the well-informed men with
whom I talked on the first of August. The session of the University was ended
and the students were either all gone or going home to different parts of Poland,
but the professors had not all departed yet on their respective holidays, and
amongst them the tone of scepticism prevailed generally. Upon the whole there
was very little inclination to talk about the possibility of a war. Nationally, the