Many publications on Belgium appeared at the time, but not that many included references to the refugees in Britain. In September 1916, had Mr. Britling Sees it Through published, arguably the finest literary representation of the Belgians in Britain. The following is an extract from the book, which you can find in its entirety through https://archive.org/details/mrbritlingseesi02wellgoog. You can find an appreciation of the work on http://www.kahnscorner.com/2013/03/1917-mr-britling-sees-it-through-by-h-g.html.
§ 7
The battle of the Marne passed into the battle of the Aisne, and
then the long lines of the struggle streamed north-westward until
the British were back in Belgium failing to clutch Menin and then
defending Ypres. The elation of September followed the bedazzlement
and dismay of August into the chapter of forgotten moods; and Mr.
Britling's sense of the magnitude, the weight and duration of this
war beyond all wars, increased steadily. The feel of it was less
and less a feeling of crisis and more and more a feeling of new
conditions. It wasn't as it had seemed at first, the end of one
human phase and the beginning of another; it was in itself a phase.
It was a new way of living. And still he could find no real point
of contact for himself with it all except the point of his pen.
Only at his writing-desk, and more particularly at night, were the
great presences of the conflict his. Yet he was always desiring
some more personal and physical participation.
Hugh came along one day in October in an ill-fitting uniform,
looking already coarser in fibre and with a nose scorched red by
the autumnal sun. He said the life was rough, but it made him feel
extraordinarily well; perhaps man was made to toil until he dropped
asleep from exhaustion, to fast for ten or twelve hours and then
eat like a wolf. He was acquiring a taste for Woodbine cigarettes,
and a heady variety of mineral waters called Monsters. He feared
promotion; he felt he could never take the high line with other
human beings demanded of a corporal. He was still trying to read a
little chemistry and crystallography, but it didn't "go with the
life." In the scanty leisure of a recruit in training it was more
agreeable to lie about and write doggerel verses and draw
caricatures of the men in one's platoon. Invited to choose what he
liked by his family, he demanded a large tuckbox such as he used to
have at school, only "
much larger,"
and a big tin of insect powder. It must be able to kill
ticks....
When he had gone, the craving for a personal share in the
nation's physical exertions became overpowering in Mr. Britling. He
wanted, he felt, to "get his skin into it." He had decided that the
volunteer movement was a hopeless one. The War Office, after a
stout resistance to any volunteer movement at all, decided to
recognise it in such a manner as to make it ridiculous. The
volunteers were to have no officers and no uniforms that could be
remotely mistaken for those of the regulars, so that in the event
of an invasion the Germans would be able to tell what they had to
deal with miles away. Wilkins found his conception of a whole
nation, all enrolled, all listed and badged according to capacity,
his dream of every one falling into place in one great voluntary
national effort, treated as the childish dreaming of that most
ignorant of all human types, a "novelist."
Punch was
delicately funny about him; he was represented as wearing a
preposterous cocked hat of his own design, designing cocked hats
for every one. Wilkins was told to "shut up" in a multitude of
anonymous letters, and publicly and privately to "leave things to
Kitchener." To bellow in loud clear tones "leave things to
Kitchener," and to depart for the theatre or the river or an
automobile tour, was felt very generally at that time to be the
proper conduct for a patriot. There was a very general persuasion
that to become a volunteer when one ought to be just modestly doing
nothing at all, was in some obscure way a form of
disloyalty....
So Mr. Britling was out of conceit with volunteering, and
instead he went and was duly sworn and entrusted with the badge of
a special constable. The duties of a special constable were chiefly
not to understand what was going on in the military sphere, and to
do what he was told in the way of watching and warding conceivably
vulnerable points. He had also to be available in the event
of civil disorder. Mr. Britling was provided with a
truncheon and sent out to guard various culverts, bridges, and
fords in the hilly country to the north-westward of Matching's
Easy. It was never very clear to him what he would do if he found a
motor-car full of armed enemies engaged in undermining a culvert,
or treacherously deepening some strategic ford. He supposed he
would either engage them in conversation, or hit them with his
truncheon, or perhaps do both things simultaneously. But as he
really did not believe for a moment that any human being was likely
to tamper with the telegraphs, telephones, ways and appliances
committed to his care, his uncertainty did not trouble him very
much. He prowled the lonely lanes and paths in the darkness, and
became better acquainted with a multitude of intriguing little
cries and noises that came from the hedges and coverts at night.
One night he rescued a young leveret from a stoat, who seemed more
than half inclined to give him battle for its prey until he cowed
and defeated it with the glare of his electric torch....
As he prowled the countryside under the great hemisphere of
Essex sky, or leant against fences or sat drowsily upon gates or
sheltered from wind and rain under ricks or sheds, he had much time
for meditation, and his thoughts went down and down below his first
surface impressions of the war. He thought no longer of the rights
and wrongs of this particular conflict but of the underlying forces
in mankind that made war possible; he planned no more ingenious
treaties and conventions between the nations, and instead he faced
the deeper riddles of essential evil and of conceivable changes in
the heart of man. And the rain assailed him and thorns tore him,
and the soaked soft meadows bogged and betrayed his wandering feet,
and the little underworld of the hedges and ditches hissed and
squealed in the darkness and pursued and fled, and devoured or were
slain.
And one night in April he was perplexed by a
commotion among the pheasants and a barking of
distant dogs, and then to his great astonishment he heard noises
like a distant firework display and saw something like a phantom
yellowish fountain-pen in the sky far away to the east lit
intermittently by a quivering search-light and going very swiftly.
And after he had rubbed his eyes and looked again, he realised that
he was looking at a Zeppelin—a Zeppelin flying Londonward
over Essex.
And all that night was wonder....
§ 8
While Mr. Britling was trying to find his duty in the routine of
a special constable, Mrs. Britling set to work with great energy to
attend various classes and qualify herself for Red Cross work. And
early in October came the great drive of the Germans towards
Antwerp and the sea, the great drive that was apparently designed
to reach Calais, and which swept before it multitudes of Flemish
refugees. There was an exodus of all classes from Antwerp into
Holland and England, and then a huge process of depopulation in
Flanders and the Pas de Calais. This flood came to the eastern and
southern parts of England and particularly to London, and there
hastily improvised organisations distributed it to a number of
local committees, each of which took a share of the refugees, hired
and furnished unoccupied houses for the use of the penniless, and
assisted those who had means into comfortable quarters. The
Matching's Easy committee found itself with accommodation for sixty
people, and with a miscellaneous bag of thirty individuals
entrusted to its care, who had been part of the load of a little
pirate steam-boat from Ostend. There were two Flemish peasant
families, and the rest were more or less middle-class refugees from
Antwerp. They were brought from the station to the Tithe barn at
Claverings, and there distributed, under the personal supervision
of Lady Homartyn and her
agent, among those
who were prepared for their entertainment. There was something like
competition among the would-be hosts; everybody was glad of the
chance of "doing something," and anxious to show these Belgians
what England thought of their plucky little country. Mr. Britling
was proud to lead off a Mr. Van der Pant, a neat little bearded man
in a black tail-coat, a black bowler hat, and a knitted muffler,
with a large rucksack and a conspicuously foreign-looking bicycle,
to the hospitalities of Dower House. Mr. Van der Pant had escaped
from Antwerp at the eleventh hour, he had caught a severe cold and,
it would seem, lost his wife and family in the process; he had much
to tell Mr. Britling, and in his zeal to tell it he did not at once
discover that though Mr. Britling knew French quite well he did not
know it very rapidly.
The dinner that night at the Dower House marked a distinct fresh
step in the approach of the Great War to the old habits and
securities of Matching's Easy. The war had indeed filled every
one's mind to the exclusion of all other topics since its very
beginning; it had carried off Herr Heinrich to Germany, Teddy to
London, and Hugh to Colchester, it had put a special brassard round
Mr. Britling's arm and carried him out into the night, given Mrs.
Britling several certificates, and interrupted the frequent visits
and gossip of Mr. Lawrence Carmine; but so far it had not
established a direct contact between the life of Matching's Easy
and the grim business of shot, shell, and bayonet at the front. But
now here was the Dower House accomplishing wonderful idioms in
Anglo-French, and an animated guest telling them—sometimes
one understood clearly and sometimes the meaning was
clouded—of men blown to pieces under his eyes, of fragments
of human beings lying about in the streets; there was trouble over
the expression
omoplate d'une femme, until one of the
youngsters got the dictionary and found out it was the
shoulder-blade of a woman; of pools
of
blood—everywhere—and of flight in the darkness.
Mr. Van der Pant had been in charge of the dynamos at the
Antwerp Power Station, he had been keeping the electrified wires in
the entanglements "alive," and he had stuck to his post until the
German high explosives had shattered his wires and rendered his
dynamos useless. He gave vivid little pictures of the noises of the
bombardment, of the dead lying casually in the open spaces, of the
failure of the German guns to hit the bridge of boats across which
the bulk of the defenders and refugees escaped. He produced a
little tourist's map of the city of Antwerp, and dotted at it with
a pencil-case. "The—what do you call?—
obus, ah,
shells! fell, so and so and so." Across here he had fled on his
bécane, and along here and here. He had carried off
his rifle, and hid it with the rifles of various other Belgians
between floor and ceiling of a house in Zeebrugge. He had found the
pirate steamer in the harbour, its captain resolved to extract the
uttermost fare out of every refugee he took to London. When they
were all aboard and started they found there was no food except the
hard ration biscuits of some Belgian soldiers. They had portioned
this out like shipwrecked people on a raft.... The
mer had
been
calme; thank Heaven! All night they had been pumping.
He had helped with the pumps. But Mr. Van der Pant hoped still to
get a reckoning with the captain of that ship.
Mr. Van der Pant had had shots at various Zeppelins. When the
Zeppelins came to Antwerp everybody turned out on the roofs and
shot at them. He was contemptuous of Zeppelins. He made derisive
gestures to express his opinion of them. They could do nothing
unless they came low, and if they came low you could hit them. One
which ventured down had been riddled; it had had to drop all its
bombs—luckily they fell in an open field—in order to
make its lame escape. It was all nonsense to say, as the English
papers did, that they took part in
the final
bombardment. Not a Zeppelin.... So he talked, and the Britling
family listened and understood as much as they could, and replied
and questioned in Anglo-French. Here was a man who but a few days
ago had been steering his bicycle in the streets of Antwerp to
avoid shell craters, pools of blood, and the torn-off arms and
shoulder-blades of women. He had seen houses flaring, set afire by
incendiary bombs, and once at a corner he had been knocked off his
bicycle by the pouff of a bursting shell.... Not only were these
things in the same world with us, they were sitting at our
table.
He told one grim story of an invalid woman unable to move, lying
in bed in her
appartement, and of how her husband went out
on the balcony to look at the Zeppelin. There was a great noise of
shooting. Ever and again he would put his head back into the room
and tell her things, and then after a time he was silent and looked
in no more. She called to him, and called again. Becoming
frightened, she raised herself by a great effort and peered through
the glass. At first she was too puzzled to understand what had
happened. He was hanging over the front of the balcony, with his
head twisted oddly. Twisted and shattered. He had been killed by
shrapnel fired from the outer fortifications....
These are the things that happen in histories and stories. They
do not happen at Matching's Easy....
Mr. Van der Pant did not seem to be angry with the Germans. But
he manifestly regarded them as people to be killed. He denounced
nothing that they had done; he related. They were just an evil
accident that had happened to Belgium and mankind. They had to be
destroyed. He gave Mr. Britling an extraordinary persuasion that
knives were being sharpened in every cellar in Brussels and Antwerp
against the day of inevitable retreat, of a resolution to
exterminate the invader that was far too deep to be vindictive....
And the man was most amazingly unconquered. Mr. Britling
perceived
the label on his habitual dinner
wine with a slight embarrassment. "Do you care," he asked, "to
drink a German wine? This is Berncasteler from the Moselle." Mr.
Van der Pant reflected. "But it is a good wine," he said. "After
the peace it will be Belgian.... Yes, if we are to be safe in the
future from such a war as this, we must have our boundaries right
up to the Rhine."
So he sat and talked, flushed and, as it were, elated by the
vividness of all that he had undergone. He had no trace of tragic
quality, no hint of subjugation. But for his costume and his
trimmed beard and his language he might have been a Dubliner or a
Cockney.
He was astonishingly cut off from all his belongings. His house
in Antwerp was abandoned to the invader; valuables and cherished
objects very skilfully buried in the garden; he had no change of
clothing except what the rucksack held. His only footwear were the
boots he came in. He could not get on any of the slippers in the
house, they were all too small for him, until suddenly Mrs.
Britling bethought herself of Herr Heinrich's pair, still left
unpacked upstairs. She produced them, and they fitted exactly. It
seemed only poetical justice, a foretaste of national
compensations, to annex them to Belgium forthwith....
Also it became manifest that Mr. Van der Pant was cut off from
all his family. And suddenly he became briskly critical of the
English way of doing things. His wife and child had preceded him to
England, crossing by Ostend and Folkestone a fortnight ago; her
parents had come in August; both groups had been seized upon by
improvised British organisations and very thoroughly and completely
lost. He had written to the Belgian Embassy and they had referred
him to a committee in London, and the committee had begun its
services by discovering a Madame Van der Pant hitherto unknown to
him at Camberwell, and displaying a certain suspicion and hostility
when he said she would not do. There had
been some futile telegrams. "What," asked Mr. Van der Pant, "ought
one to do?"
Mr. Britling temporised by saying he would "make inquiries," and
put Mr. Van der Pant off for two days. Then he decided to go up to
London with him and "make inquiries on the spot." Mr. Van der Pant
did not discover his family, but Mr. Britling discovered the
profound truth of a comment of Herr Heinrich's which he had
hitherto considered utterly trivial, but which had nevertheless
stuck in his memory. "The English," Herr Heinrich had said, "do not
understanding indexing. It is the root of all good
organisation."
Finally, Mr. Van der Pant adopted the irregular course of asking
every Belgian he met if they had seen any one from his district in
Antwerp, if they had heard of the name of "Van der Pant," if they
had encountered So-and-so or So-and-so. And by obstinacy and good
fortune he really got on to the track of Madame Van der Pant; she
had been carried off into Kent, and a day later the Dower House was
the scene of a happy reunion. Madame was a slender lady, dressed
well and plainly, with a Belgian common sense and a Catholic
reserve, and André was like a child of wax, delicate and
charming and unsubstantial. It seemed incredible that he could ever
grow into anything so buoyant and incessant as his father. The
Britling boys had to be warned not to damage him. A sitting-room
was handed over to the Belgians for their private use, and for a
time the two families settled into the Dower House side by side.
Anglo-French became the table language of the household. It
hampered Mr. Britling very considerably. And both families set
themselves to much unrecorded observation, much unspoken mutual
criticism, and the exercise of great patience. It was tiresome for
the English to be tied to a language that crippled all spontaneous
talk; these linguistic gymnastics were fun to begin with, but soon
they became very troublesome; and the Belgians
suspected sensibilities in their hosts and a vast
unwritten code of etiquette that did not exist; at first they were
always waiting, as it were, to be invited or told or included; they
seemed always deferentially backing out from intrusions. Moreover,
they would not at first reveal what food they liked or what they
didn't like, or whether they wanted more or less.... But these
difficulties were soon smoothed away, they Anglicised quickly and
cleverly. André grew bold and cheerful, and lost his first
distrust of his rather older English playmates. Every day at lunch
he produced a new, carefully prepared piece of English, though for
some time he retained a marked preference for "Good morning,
Saire," and "Thank you very mush," over all other locutions, and
fell back upon them on all possible and many impossible occasions.
And he could do some sleight-of-hand tricks with remarkable skill
and humour, and fold paper with quite astonishing results.
Meanwhile Mr. Van der Pant sought temporary employment in England,
went for long rides upon his bicycle, exchanged views with Mr.
Britling upon a variety of subjects, and became a wonderful player
of hockey.
He played hockey with an extraordinary zest and nimbleness.
Always he played in the tail coat, and the knitted muffler was
never relinquished; he treated the game entirely as an occasion for
quick tricks and personal agility; he bounded about the field like
a kitten, he pirouetted suddenly, he leapt into the air and came
down in new directions; his fresh-coloured face was alive with
delight, the coat tails and the muffler trailed and swished about
breathlessly behind his agility. He never passed to other players;
he never realised his appointed place in the game; he sought simply
to make himself a leaping screen about the ball as he drove it
towards the goal. But André he would not permit to play at
all, and Madame played like a lady, like a Madonna, like a saint
carrying the instrument of her martyrdom. The game
and its enthusiasms flowed round her and receded
from her; she remained quite valiant but tolerant, restrained;
doing her best to do the extraordinary things required of her, but
essentially a being of passive dignities, living chiefly for them;
Letty careering by her, keen and swift, was like a creature of a
different species....
Mr. Britling cerebrated abundantly about these contrasts.
"What has been blown in among us by these German shells," he
said, "is essentially a Catholic family. Blown clean out of its
setting.... We who are really—Neo-Europeans....
"At first you imagine there is nothing separating us but
language. Presently you find that language is the least of our
separations. These people are people living upon fundamentally
different ideas from ours, ideas far more definite and complete
than ours. You imagine that home in Antwerp as something much more
rounded off, much more closed in, a cell, a real social unit, a
different thing altogether from this place of meeting. Our boys
play cheerfully with all comers; little André hasn't learnt
to play with any outside children at all. We must seem incredibly
open to these Van der Pants. A house without sides.... Last
Sunday I could not find out the names of the two girls who came on
bicycles and played so well. They came with Kitty Westropp. And Van
der Pant wanted to know how they were related to us. Or how was it
they came?...
"Look at Madame. She's built on a fundamentally different plan
from any of our womenkind here. Tennis, the bicycle, co-education,
the two-step, the higher education of women.... Say these things
over to yourself, and think of her. It's like talking of a nun in
riding breeches. She's a specialised woman, specialising in
womanhood, her sphere is the home. Soft, trailing, draping skirts,
slow movements, a veiled face; for no Oriental veil could be more
effectual than her beautiful
Catholic quiet.
Catholicism invented the invisible purdah. She is far more akin to
that sweet little Indian lady with the wonderful robes whom Carmine
brought over with her tall husband last summer, than she is to
Letty or Cissie. She, too, undertook to play hockey. And played it
very much as Madame Van der Pant played it....
"The more I see of our hockey," said Mr. Britling, "the more
wonderful it seems to me as a touchstone of character and culture
and breeding...."
Mr. Manning, to whom he was delivering this discourse, switched
him on to a new track by asking what he meant by
"Neo-European."
"It's a bad phrase," said Mr. Britling. "I'll withdraw it. Let
me try and state exactly what I have in mind. I mean something that
is coming up in America and here and the Scandinavian countries and
Russia, a new culture, an escape from the Levantine religion and
the Catholic culture that came to us from the Mediterranean. Let me
drop Neo-European; let me say Northern. We are Northerners. The
key, the heart, the nucleus and essence of every culture is its
conception of the relations of men and women; and this new culture
tends to diminish the specialisation of women as women, to let them
out from the cell of the home into common citizenship with men.
It's a new culture, still in process of development, which will
make men more social and co-operative and women bolder, swifter,
more responsible and less cloistered. It minimises instead of
exaggerating the importance of sex....
"And," said Mr. Britling, in very much the tones in which a
preacher might say "Sixthly," "it is just all this Northern
tendency that this world struggle is going to release. This war is
pounding through Europe, smashing up homes, dispersing and mixing
homes, setting Madame Van der Pant playing hockey, and André
climbing trees with my young ruffians; it is killing young
men
by the million, altering the proportions
of the sexes for a generation, bringing women into business and
office and industry, destroying the accumulated wealth that kept so
many of them in refined idleness, flooding the world with strange
doubts and novel ideas...."
§ 9
But the conflict of manners and customs that followed the
invasion of the English villages by French and Belgian refugees did
not always present the immigrants as Catholics and the hosts as
"Neo-European." In the case of Mr. Dimple it was the other way
round. He met Mr. Britling in Claverings park and told him his
troubles....
"Of course," he said, "we have to do our Utmost for Brave Little
Belgium. I would be the last to complain of any little
inconvenience one may experience in doing that. Still, I must
confess I think you and dear Mrs. Britling are fortunate,
exceptionally fortunate, in the Belgians you have got. My
guests—it's unfortunate— the man is some sort of
journalist and quite—oh! much too much—an Atheist. An
open positive one. Not simply Honest Doubt. I'm quite prepared for
honest doubt nowadays. You and I have no quarrel over that. But he
is aggressive. He makes remarks about miracles, quite derogatory
remarks, and not always in French. Sometimes he almost speaks
English. And in front of my sister. And he goes out, he says,
looking for a Café. He never finds a Café, but he
certainly finds every public house within a radius of miles. And he
comes back smelling dreadfully of beer. When I drop a Little Hint,
he blames the beer. He says it is not good beer—our good
Essex beer! He doesn't understand any of our simple ways. He's
sophisticated. The girls about here wear Belgian flags—and
air their little bits of French. And he takes it as an
encouragement. Only yesterday
there was a
scene. It seems he tried to kiss the Hickson girl at the
inn—Maudie.... And his wife; a great big slow woman—in
every way she is—Ample; it's dreadful even to seem to
criticise, but I do so
wish she would not see fit to sit
down and nourish her baby in my poor old bachelor
drawing-room—often at the most
unseasonable times.
And—so lavishly...."
Mr. Britling attempted consolations.
"But anyhow," said Mr. Dimple, "I'm better off than poor dear
Mrs. Bynne. She secured two milliners. She insisted upon them. And
their clothes were certainly beautifully made—even my poor
old unworldly eye could tell that. And she thought two milliners
would be so useful with a large family like hers. They certainly
said they were milliners. But it seems—I don't know
what we shall do about them.... My dear Mr. Britling, those young
women are anything but milliners—anything but
milliners...."
A faint gleam of amusement was only too perceptible through the
good man's horror.
"Sirens, my dear Mr. Britling. Sirens. By profession."...
§ 10
October passed into November, and day by day Mr. Britling was
forced to apprehend new aspects of the war, to think and rethink
the war, to have his first conclusions checked and tested, twisted
askew, replaced. His thoughts went far and wide and
deeper—until all his earlier writing seemed painfully shallow
to him, seemed a mere automatic response of obvious comments to the
stimulus of the war's surprise. As his ideas became subtler and
profounder, they became more difficult to express; he talked less;
he became abstracted and irritable at table. To two people in
particular Mr. Britling found his real ideas inexpressible, to Mr.
Direck and to Mr. Van der Pant.
Each of these gentlemen brought with him the implication or the
intimation of a critical attitude towards England. It was all very
well for Mr. Britling himself to be critical of England; that is an
Englishman's privilege. To hear Mr. Van der Pant questioning
British efficiency or to suspect Mr. Direck of high, thin American
superiorities to war, was almost worse than to hear Mrs. Harrowdean
saying hostile things about Edith. It roused an even acuter
protective emotion.
In the case of Mr. Van der Pant matters were complicated by the
difficulty of the language, which made anything but the crudest
statements subject to incalculable misconception.
Mr. Van der Pant had not the extreme tactfulness of his so
typically Catholic wife; he made it only too plain that he thought
the British postal and telegraph service slow and slack, and the
management of the Great Eastern branch lines wasteful and
inefficient. He said the workmen in the fields and the workmen he
saw upon some cottages near the junction worked slowlier and with
less interest than he had ever seen any workman display in all his
life before. He marvelled that Mr. Britling lit his house with
acetylene and not electric light. He thought fresh eggs were
insanely dear, and his opinion of Matching's Easy pig-keeping was
uncomplimentary. The roads, he said, were not a means of getting
from place to place, they were a
dédale; he drew
derisive maps with his finger on the table-cloth of the lane system
about the Dower House. He was astonished that there was no
Café in Matching's Easy; he declared that the "public house"
to which he went with considerable expectation was no public house
at all; it was just a sly place for drinking beer.... All these
were things Mr. Britling might have remarked himself; from a
Belgian refugee he found them intolerable.
He set himself to explain to Mr. Van der Pant firstly that these
things did not matter in the slightest degree, the
national attention, the national interest ran in
other directions; and secondly that they were, as a matter of fact
and on the whole, merits slightly disguised. He produced a pleasant
theory that England is really not the Englishman's field, it is his
breeding place, his resting place, a place not for efficiency but
good humour. If Mr. Van der Pant were to make inquiries he would
find there was scarcely a home in Matching's Easy that had not sent
some energetic representative out of England to become one of the
English of the world. England was the last place in which English
energy was spent. These hedges, these dilatory roads were full of
associations. There was a road that turned aside near Market
Saffron to avoid Turk's wood; it had been called Turk's wood first
in the fourteenth century after a man of that name. He quoted
Chesterton's happy verses to justify these winding lanes.
"The road turned first towards the left,
Where Perkin's quarry made the cleft;
The path turned next towards the right,
Because the mastiff used to bite...."
And again:
"And I should say they wound about
To find the town of Roundabout,
The merry town of Roundabout
That makes the world go round."
If our easy-going ways hampered a hard efficiency, they did at
least develop humour and humanity. Our diplomacy at any rate had
not failed us....
He did not believe a word of this stuff. His deep irrational
love for England made him say these things.... For years he had
been getting himself into hot water because he had been writing and
hinting just such criticisms as Mr. Van der Pant expressed so
bluntly.... But he wasn't going to accept foreign help in
dissecting his mother....
And another curious effect that Mr. Van der Pant had upon Mr.
Britling was to produce an obstinate confidence
about the war and the nearness of the German
collapse. He would promise Mr. Van der Pant that he should be back
in Antwerp before May; that the Germans would be over the Rhine by
July. He knew perfectly well that his ignorance of all the military
conditions was unqualified, but still he could not restrain himself
from this kind of thing so soon as he began to speak Entente
Cordiale—Anglo-French, that is to say. Something in his
relationship to Mr. Van der Pant obliged him to be acutely and
absurdly the protecting British.... At times he felt like a
conscious bankrupt talking off the hour of disclosure. But indeed
all that Mr. Britling was trying to say against the difficulties of
a strange language and an alien temperament, was that the honour of
England would never be cleared until Belgium was restored and
avenged....
While Mr. Britling was patrolling unimportant roads and
entertaining Mr. Van der Pant with discourses upon the nearness of
victory and the subtle estimableness of all that was indolent,
wasteful and evasive in English life, the war was passing from its
first swift phases into a slower, grimmer struggle. The German
retreat ended at the Aisne, and the long outflanking manoeuvres of
both hosts towards the Channel began. The English attempts to
assist Belgium in October came too late for the preservation of
Antwerp, and after a long and complicated struggle in Flanders the
British failed to outflank the German right, lost Ghent, Menin and
the Belgian coast, but held Ypres and beat back every attempt of
the enemy to reach Dunkirk and Calais. Meanwhile the smaller German
colonies and islands were falling to the navy, the Australian
battleship
Sydney smashed the
Emden at Cocos Island,
and the British naval disaster of Coronel was wiped out by the
battle of the Falklands. The Russians were victorious upon their
left and took Lemberg, and after some vicissitudes of fortune
advanced to Przemysl, occupying the larger part of Galicia; but
the
disaster of Tannenberg had broken their
progress in East Prussia, and the Germans were pressing towards
Warsaw. Turkey had joined the war, and suffered enormous losses in
the Caucasus. The Dardanelles had been shelled for the first time,
and the British were at Basra on the Euphrates.
