3
INTRODUCTION.
It was precisely a quarter to two o'clock.
A careless crowd occupied the terrace of the Belle-vue Hotel, their only problem for the moment being to decide whether to go for a walk into the forest, or to go for a bath at the Vöslau hot-baths. I had decided for the latter, when a garçon ran quickly up with:
"Please, Mr. Editor, to the telephone!"
A few minutes later cold shivers ran down my back, and the bath seemed farther removed from me than the stars of heaven.
Soon afterwards there were draughts of air about one, as the hundredth vehicle flew over the chaussées, impinged on the street-corners with two leaning wheels, shot over the pavement of narrow places, and were away into the precincts of Vienna. … One saw groups forming here and there, and with the commonplace was mingled an indefinable sense of the extraordinary.
Something had happened. In the Ballplatz, before the house No. 2, the offices of the Royal and Imperial Ministries of the All-highest House and of the Exterior, stood an unusual number of motors, among them some quite unusual foreign-looking vehicles. Hurrying men flew by. …
It was the 28th of June in the year of grace 1914.
***
Was all that was involved in it the heavy dream of a neurasthenic? When I delve darkly into the past I see big-lettered headlines, under which black print gave out flames of fire.
Placards about victory, about grim struggles, charges, and petitions, and laments, and holdings-out, and reliefs, long war reports of wordy youngsters, dull novels tinged with a tragic dark-mindedness, death-advertisements and casualty-lists . . . . they connect by misty links the day of hidden agents with to-day.
A world is in that melting-pot. Galileo's eppur si muove ("and yet it moves") had to prove true at least during those years. At least the one half of the earth has always been shame-
