THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS
in a month. It was almost as if Great Britain had ceased to be a nation and become a family.
GREAT SCENES IN GREAT BRITAIN
Nor did the industries of the country, in spite
of the lure of drink and the temptation to strikes,
fall behind the spirit of the people. At the darkest
moment of our inquietude the call of health took
me for a tour in a motor-car over fifteen hundred
miles of England, and though my journey lay
through three or four of the least industrial and
most placid of our counties, I found evidences of
effort on every hand. The high roads were the
track of marching armies of men in training;
the broad moors were armed camps; the little
towns were recruiting stations or depots for
wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers
with the hay crop still standing for want of hands
to cut it, and the villages seemed to be deserted
save by little children and the feeble, old men, who
had nothing left to do but to wait for death.
The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large hoardings on the face of a public building recorded in golden letters the
