I wish to express my obligation to the Proprietors of the "Daily News" for permission to use material contributed to their columns. On Tuesday, 28th of July, I returned from the Alps; the weather conditions had been arctic and the climbing more than usually exciting. During a bathe in the Lake of Geneva, which has become the customary end of the climbing season, I remember saying to my companion, "Well, this is the end of all sensation for the year. Now for the usual dull winter's work. The journey started normally.
But at Newhaven it was startling to see three English travellers turn and rush off the boat at the last minute. It was the first and unforgettable sign of the break-up in our order of life. To take a ticket and start a journey no longer meant the inevitable procession to its end.
We were beginning the life of the unexpected; when event and interruption was to take the place of the decent ordering of hours by convention and system. On the boat were only men; older men called up to the colours.
Most of them were fathers of families. One man sat in tears over a photograph of his five children spread out before him. Some had lived all their lives in England.
But he was French, though he could scarcely speak it. A very old priest was returning, after twenty years, to "die among his soldier children" in a French frontier villageβ"or perhaps my grand-children," he corrected, with a faint smile.
