THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship."
He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a "Grave International Situation" did not excite him very much. There had been so many grave international situations in recent years.
This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking the Slav confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the Slavs.
But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of "hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation" were at an end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six
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