London Under the Shadow of War

I

I HAVE known London in many moods and phases, which is natural, as I have lived in London for the greater part of thirty years. But never have I known it as it is to-day under the shadow of war. Not that this is the first time in my experience that the shadow has fallen. But hitherto war has been no nearer than Asia or Africa, quite another matter from war just beyond the Channel, with the chance thrown in of the invasion England has not had to face since William the Conqueror, or to fear since Napoleon, and with an occasional warning, in the shelling of an East Coast town, of what invasion means. And, certainly, if London since my coming has never been under so near and so heavy a shadow, neither has it ever seemed to me so extraordinary and so interesting.

Before Great Britain had declared war, the fear of war held London in its grasp. I have read the boast of some Englishmen that the turmoil in Europe and their own plunge headlong into the depths could not stir them out of their natural stolidity. But they were not in London when they boasted. In London the tension could be felt; the knowledge of what such a war must involve, the unthinkable risks, the magnitude of the enterprise and its cost, weighed upon the town like the sense of doom in an old Greek tragedy; the shrinking from the catastrophe was so unmistakable that no White Paper was needed to explain how far Great Britain was from being its immediate cause. And the very season added to the effect, tightened the tension. The end of July as a rule brings to London the repose that makes it, in my opinion, the most desirable place to spend the late summer and early autumn in. But there could be no repose while this unspoken dread, this fever of waiting filled the air. The money and food panics of that long week of suspense came almost as a relief, giving everybody something to do or an excuse to do it. I know that when the bank rate began to go up by leaps and bounds, and the Stock Exchange closed its doors, and gold disappeared, and Penny Saving Funds were besieged, and rumors were everywhere of men driving from bank to bank and filling their motors mountain high with sovereigns, I passed an agitated quarter of an hour trying to decide whether or no I ought to fetch and bring home, under my arm, my own little molehill. And if I had the sense to keep my head in this crisis, I lost it when London prepared for famine as well as bankruptcy; hurrying to Jackson’s, — the grocers who sell American delicacies in Piccadilly, — I invested in enough canned corn and lima beans, Virginia pickles and California olives, gumbo soup and clam chowder, to save my family from starvation for at least a fortnight. It was absurd, I confess, but I score now over my more practical friends who invested in such sensible things as macaroni, dried peas, rice, tapioca, and the cereals they never eat if they can help themselves, in such sensible quantities that a siege might be a convenience.

It was as well in those days that London had something to laugh at sometimes, or it must have cried all the time. Even in memory I have not so much as a smile for the other chief event of that eventful week — the flight from London of French and Germans, for the front. People in many parts of the town may have known nothing of it except what they read in the newspapers; but I, who live round the corner from Charing Cross, saw of it more than I wanted, when French chefs and German waiters, at the first summons, dropped their work at hotels and restaurants, and Soho lost half its population and the City half its clerks. I am not given to sentiment, but the unflinching gayety of the Frenchmen gripped my throat as I passed groups of them on their way to the station; or as I saw them at the station piling into their trains at one platform while Germans crowded into theirs at the next; or as from our high windows I watched them waving their last good-bye when the train steamed out to the bridge.

It is the little things in life that often make the big things real to us, and I felt the grim tragedy the more because of the personal, the intimate, theeveryday manner in which it interfered with me. First it was my French butcher who left, taking with him all immediate chance for the neat French fricandeaus and filets piqués that reconcile me to the occasional joint. Then it was the porters of my French grocer, so that the superior Italian in pince-nez was obliged to leave the cashier’s desk and struggle up the four flights of our back stairs with bags and boxes, to his supreme wrath and my equal embarrassment. Then it was somebody from almost every shop where I deal in Soho. And worse, almost at once it was Marcel, a chef, who is also Augustine’s husband, — in which capacity he has lived with us many years and become an indispensable member of our household. On Monday morning came his call from the French Consul; by Tuesday afternoon he had given up his excellent post in the City, his good wages, the chances of that careful education it is his ambition to give to his two small daughters, and was well on his way to Paris. Even M. Jules, who shampoos my hair, wrote me that ‘the outbreak of hostilities between his country and Germany had placed him in the position to serve under the French colors’; and though he had never worn the petit piou-piou’s red trousers and blue coat, never handled a gun, never done a day’s march and was too old to begin, his capable hands, whose heaviest task had been the washing and waving of ladies’ hair, could be useful in the harvest fields and vineyards of France. I had been served and waited on by heroes without knowing it.

II

But during the week of panic and flight, London was calmness itself compared to London during the week of Bank holidays given it to recover in. One Bank holiday in three months is about as much as I can stand. I seldom stir out of the house as long as it lasts. But I could not shut myself up for a week of Bank holidays; and besides, while I hated the streets in their new excitement, they fascinated me and I did not want to keep out of them. They were really astonishing: all about us, filled with the crowds I am used to, — the tradespeople and housekeepers and little clerks and shop-girls who every Sunday and holiday afternoon make the Strand look for all the world like the High Street of a country town; the respectable sightseers whom any public spectacle attracts from East and West, North and South, to the centre of London; the degenerates who emerge from none but the police know where at any public crisis, and who, throughout the week, drifted into our corner of easy-going, open-all-day front doors, until we had to remind our housekeeper again what locks and keys and hallboys are made for. But there were also the crowds I am not used to; for now war and not merely the fear of it had London in its grasp: everywhere officers wearing in broad daylight, without shame, the uniform that at normal times they would rather die than let the public see them in; and soldiers in khaki, and recruits in any clothes under the sun, and Red Cross ambulances, and nurses, and trains of business-like artillery, and wagons laden with fieldtelegraph and telephone apparatus, and armored motors, and tents, and more soldiers and horses in the parks, — all the machinery of war in a town accustomed only to the parade of war; and, sprung from the gutter, hawkers selling little flags and war-buttons and caricatures of the Kaiser. To add to the uproar and congestion and confusion, at our end of the Strand and at the top of Parliament Street, the road had been taken up for the summer mending, war not having entered into the contracts of peaceful borough councils; and busses and motors and taxis and carts were blocked for squares, and every time I went out or came home I had to push my way through the seething, gaping, bewildered crowds and cross the congested streets at the risk of my life.

And just when not an inch of room seemed left in our part of the town, the American invasion of London, now passed into history, began: Americans flying from France and Belgium and Germany and Austria; Americans with passage on German boats no longer running; Americans with passage on French and British boats turned into cruisers and transports; Americans with not a cent except on letters of credit and travelers’ cheques which not a bank was open to cash; Americans with their nerves shattered and their manners lost; Americans grieved and shocked that Europe could go to war at a moment so inconvenient to them and allow mobilization to interfere with their comforts and luxuries as tourists; Americans congregating in and near American steamship offices and American bankers and American agents, for mutual support and encouragement and indignation; Americans haunting St. Martin’s Churchyard, although to have discovered one special trunk in the pile of American luggage dumped there would have been about as easy as finding the proverbial needle in the haystack; Americans flying to the newly constituted American Committee at the Savoy, demanding passports over the counter, until the Haymarket and Pall Mall and Cockspur Street and the Strand were converted into a little America; until my native American became the common language of the London streets; until the steamship companies and clerks had no time for anything more than the soothing of scared schoolma’ams and the heartening of timid university professors; until Brown, Shipley and Co.’s was the scene of a daily Philadelphia reception; until I began to think that there was nobody in London except Americans and soldiers, — altogether a mad, topsy-turvy, unbelievable London.

An unbelievable London even as I saw it without crossing the threshold of our flat. For the American invasion swept on to our terrace, into our house, up in our lift. From the Haymarket and Pall Mall and Cockspur Street and the Strand, Little America adjourned to our rooms; we held a daily Philadelphia reception in rivalry to Brown, Shipley and Co. I had not heard so much American talked in a year; I could not have seen more Americans in the same length of time had I been at home. And each came with a tale of adventure, a special grievance, a case of nerves. This one had been held up in France, this one in Germany; some had escaped with the clothes on their backs and some had not lost as much as a pin; some had commandeered special trains and some were forced to travel with the troops; some had lost their steamers and were sailing in the steerage, and some had not lost their steamers but had made up their minds they were going to; some had just arrived on steamers guarded by cruisers, and some were just going on steamers through waters strewn with mines. Most of them — fortunately not all — were convinced that the war had begun when it did simply to annoy them, and too many were not only annoyed but frightened, losing their heads, as well as their manners, to say nothing of their good solid flesh, — I am told that more than one went home several pounds lighter than he left. I am puzzled to this day to understand why my fellow country-people, who face their own wars with courage, should have been so routed by a war other people have to fight.

The daily reception which we were surprised into holding was as English as American. Apparently, after the orgy of Bank holidays nobody could get back to business again. Publishers, whom as a rule we must beg humbly beforehand for a morning interview, dropped in at eleven for no reason except that, as they were doing nothing at their office, they thought they might as well come round and do it with us. Directors of galleries whom we had not seen in a year made equally early visits with no excuse whatever save to retail the gossip of their clubs. Women, whose calls are usually ceremonies, rushed in at any hour because they were passing on their way to the numerous women’s aid societies that had sprung up like mushrooms in our neighborhood. Writers came because they had no heart to write articles and books which nobody wanted. Artists appeared, recklessly squandering the best hours of daylight, because their every commission was canceled, and also because, had they had work to do, they could not have done it. Nobody could do any work, and as nobody would let us do ours, we put it up and accepted the inevitable. Other friends, who had given up their old tasks only to take on new ones, dropped in to show themselves off with the special constable’s baton in their pocket or the red cross on their arm, in Yeomanry or Territorial uniform, in Despatch Bearer’s or Special Intelligencer’s outfit.

Another of the rare humors of these dreadful months was the spectacle of an Englishman to whom long generations of ancestors have bequeathed but few short feet of stature, pirouetting round that we might enjoy him from every point of view in his new khaki, proud as a small boy in the first cowboy suit or first Indian feathers; while Augustine — with whom he is on excellent terms, but whose prejudice is for the substantial red trousers and blue coat of France — laughed to scorn his fine braiding and belting, his jaunty spurs and cap and cane, calling them ‘ rien que de la fantaisie.’

And the excitement trickled in, not only by way of the lift, but at the back stairs. Augustine, whose sixteen years in England have taught her no English, was perpetually summoning me to get the latest budget of news from every messenger and tradesman’s boy, and above all from my ice-man, who would have made the fortunes of the yellow press: in a week he had sunk the German Navy and driven the German Army out of Belgium, — ‘it takes us Englishmen to do it,’ — and swamped Harrod’s, Whiteley’s, Shoolbred’s by millions of orders, and bankrupted every shop in the French quarter, and swept the country clean of flour, and run up the price of sugar and meat, and stunned me by so many amazing rumors, so much more amazing than any of the hundreds about town reaching me by the front door, — from people who knew somebody on the inside, as everybody did, — that it was a mere trifle to swallow whole the story about the phantom Russians which everybody was swallowing.

The phantom Russians grew miraculously from thousands to millions; the time of their encamping on Salisbury Plain and going into khaki was known to the day and the hour; and they turned up again only yesterday in the passes of Servia. The myth itself needed no explanation; it was itself one of many explanations of the emotional state everybody was and still is in. The English are the most emotional people in the world, but their manner of expressing their emotion varies with circumstances and always differs from other people’s because it is their fond belief that they do not show it at all. In the last war the pleasant emotion of self-confidence took the form of noisy send-offs to the troops, of blustering boasts of a holiday walk into the enemy’s capital and back home in time for Christmas. In this war the emotion is charged with doubt, the intensity of which can be gauged by the official silences and the surprise of the British public that British soldiers can fight, and by the consequent hysterical adulation of Tommy Atkins. I have heard usually sensible Englishmen talk of Tommy’s exploits in Belgium and France with the fond, fatuous pride of a mother praising her babies; while the newspapers, during the early weeks of the war, were so preoccupied with his heroism that they forgot how tiny a space he filled in that grimly long line of trenches; and the question often heard in London, asked in tones of virtuous surprise and complacent superiority, was, ‘But what are the French doing?’ ‘As if the handful of British soldiers in France were holding up the hordes of Germans, while the French soldiers sat snugly at their own firesides toasting their toes! ’ an indignant French friend said to me.

III

However, the British have never been emotional to the point of permitting their emotions to detract from their interests as a nation of shopkeepers, — which Napoleon called them with a truth that has made the name stick. When, after a week or so, it was evident that London was not starved out and was not going to be, that prices had not leaped up out of reach, that buying and selling had not stopped dead, it seemed to me that I could positively hear London’s breath of relief, as the jubilant shout of ‘ Business as Usual’ was raised, became the new popular war-cry, appeared in large letters in every shop window alongside the Call to Arms, headed every popular advertisement, and inspired endless talk of war against German commerce.

It is no wonder that many people in England began to believe that fighting the Germans meant — for the British anyway — no more than doing them out of their trade. The few with common sense knew better: knew that the English, to catch up with the Germans, must get rid of the present government-bred belief in work as a wrong and the present reliance upon government to see that they get as little of it to do as possible; that while German militarism is an evil to be crushed, German industry is an asset to be cultivated. But common sense is not a common attribute of the Briton; I can tell — by the way, some of my tradesmen ask me if I do not think the French and Russians are very slow — how much people of their class have been convinced, by all this talk, that fighting with shot and shell is the Allies’ share of the work, while the Briton’s is to run off with the business the German is too busy in the field to attend to. The excuse of the laborer’s wife, reproached because she did not force her husband into Kitchener’s army, ‘ Why, the Germans ain’t comin’ ’ere, are they?’ shows the same misunderstanding of what the war is about and what it involves, — a misunderstanding incomprehensible to me. I am sure that to the multitude the mere bravado of behaving as if business really were as usual seems a defense against the Germans no less admirable than the trenches into which the army has dug itself in France and Belgium.

Though I can feel the tension, the nerves, the fright of the classes which the English call ‘Upper’; though I know how the men of these classes have all gone in one capacity or another, I find it hard to accept the fact that business is ‘as usual’ with the great mass of the public, when I see the long lines waiting at the pit-doors of theatres and music halls, the crowded restaurants, the overflowing tea-houses, and above all, the uninterrupted devotion to sport. I am not astonished that Americans arriving in London from France — where they had seen towns emptied of every man, regiments composed of every class and trade and profession marching to the front, Paris sad and in mourning, tragedy in every woman’s face —were appalled by the contrast. Night after night while summer lasted, the Americans who sat with us on our high balcony outside the studio windows would cry out in dismay at the gayety, the apparent unconcern of the people below in the gardens, listening to the music, drinking tea at the little tables under the trees, laughing and talking, while England’s allies across the Channel were being driven out of house and home, their fair land ravaged, their fair houses razed to the ground. Belgians, on the same balcony, faced by the same scene, have told me that, seeing London so unmoved and gay, they could but ask themselves in bewilderment if these things really were, — if they were sleeping now, or if the horrors they thought they had lived through in Belgium were the hideous nightmare.

One of my most vivid memories of the early days of the war must ever be of the evening of the Sunday when London heard for the first time the true story of Mons and the British defeat there, and of the flight of the British troops over the Pas de Calais into Picardy as far as Dieppe — one of the perfect evenings which, like the perfect days, followed each other in heartbreaking succession through August and September and October and well into November. The beauty and the pleasant heat had crowded the gardens at the music hour as I had not seen them crowded through the summer: the women in their gayest summer dresses; gay lights glowing round the bandstand and from the tea-house; within the big windows of the Hotel Cecil, lights flaring softly and discreetly from under their pink shades; taxi after taxi driving up to the doors of the Savage Club on the Terrace, where a man in slippers sauntered up and down, taking his little Pekinese for an evening airing; at the near windows of the Society for the Study of Germs, the student in his linen coat working with his accustomed serenity and patience; and, in the intervals when there was no music, St. Martin’s bells ringing for evening service as peacefully as the bells of a peaceful village church. Soon the moon swung high in the heavens, and I shrank from the cruelty of London taking its pleasures in the tranquil night; nobody, it seemed, could spare a thought for the British dead piled high at Mons and the British soldiers flying for their lives a few short hours away.

It is harder still to accept the supremacy of sport, an affair not of an evening but of every day that passes, — the refusal of big burly Britons to be exiled from their golf links or tennis court or football field or race-course for so trivial a duty as defense of their country, or even to be interested in the defense as much as in their play. By some Englishmen of this type the war at its outbreak was summed up as ‘a jolly nuisance’ that cut short their summer’s golf on Continental links. If anything could have made the fall of Antwerp more bitter, it was the poster of the afternoon papers that same day announcing ‘Football Results’ in as big letters, and their columns devoting almost as much space to one struggle as to the other. I have seen as glaring posters of racing results when London was afloat with wild rumors of a British naval disaster. If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, evidently there are modern Londoners who believe the Germans will be beaten on the race-course and at the cup ties and international matches of the Professional Football Association; and, curiously, while the persistence of football has at last got to be a scandal at home and is tabooed by some papers, racing flourishes unreproached and columns and pages continue to be spared to its daily record.

IV

‘Business as Usual’ may be shrieked from the house-top, — or the shop-window, — but though London has settled down to the fact of the war and, to this extent, has got over its attack of nerves, business, except the business of sport, is about as unusual as it can be. The Board of Trade, I do not doubt, can supply the figures and facts to prove me wrong; but my interest is in London as it looks, and as my life in it is affected, not in the London of facts and figures. The statistics I have most confidence in are provided by my personal experience; and there is not an hour of the day, nor a quarter of the hour, — there is nothing I can do, not a step I can take, — in which I am not brought face to face with the unusualness of everything. I do not exaggerate. My habits of years are interrupted, and this in the simplest, the most commonplace details of everyday life. For instance, in London as it was, when I wanted to know the hour, Big Ben told me in good loud strokes and chimes, quarter by quarter; now, Big Ben does not strike by day or by night. Of old, I could hope for, or dread, a letter every hour, from eight in the morning until nine at night; now there are but five posts in the day, — almost five too many, for they bring petitions for such innumerable funds that if I answered a tenth of them somebody would have to start a new fund for me. As things used to be, if my soul yearned to relieve itself in complaint, I had the landlord’s agent safe in his office a minute away; to-day, he is drilling in a remote camp in the South of England. If I attempt now to find fault with the boys downstairs, I am reminded that Arthur, who understood my ways, is with some Territorial cavalry in France. Once, at the first sound of street-organ or streetcry, I was sure that my determined neighbor would pounce on the offender and save me the trouble; to-day even she listens without a murmur to the untrained buglers who, under the Arches, practice their calls. If I stop my work to look out of the window by my desk,—as I have a pleasant fashion of doing at frequent intervals, — it is to see on the Embankment, not only taxis and trams, but regiments or companies or squads of the new breed of British soldiers, in khaki or tweeds or blue serge or black coats or corduroys, in military caps or cloth caps or top hats or bowlers or no hats at all, without a gun to their name, or a band or a bugle, singing, whistling, straggling in anything but time; the same soldiers who whistle, sing, and straggle down Regent Street and up Oxford Street, through Knightsbridge and Mayfair, in every section and slum and suburb of London, holding up busses and motors, blocking the way for shoppers, giving London the air of a garrison town.

But I cannot go out of the house without being held up by something just as unusual. At the top of our dingy little passage leading to the Strand, there is a crowd waiting for royalty to drive away from Charing Cross Hospital. At Trafalgar Square, between three and four in the afternoon, there is a crowd listening to the military band at the base of Nelson’s Column. At Charing Cross Station, another crowd watches the arrival of wounded soldiers — strangest and saddest sight of all, except the still stranger, sadder one of the arrival of Belgian refugees who have made of London a Belgian town: L’Indépendance Belge and La Métropole sold at street corners, Belgian families advertising for each other in the London papers, French and Flemish talked everywhere, Belgian plays in the theatre, fantastic Belgian uniforms mixed with sober khaki, Belgian wounded in the hospitals, invitations to ‘Our Belgian Allies’ decorating the shops, elaborate Belgian bows and greetings startling Piccadilly and the Strand out of their wonted awkwardness, a Belgian invasion following the American invasion on to our terrace, into our house, up in our lift.

Everything is strange in my daily round of duties and pleasures. The Times now supplies me with a Sunday edition; my druggist will sell me only British-made cologne suddenly sprung upon the market: the landmarks on my most familiar routes are no longer recognizable: in Cockspur Street, the office of the Hamburg-Amerika line is transformed by the irony of things into a busy recruiting office; rows of Red Cross ambulances are drawn up in sleepy St. James’s Square; there is a soldiers’ shelter in Grosvenor Square; tents stand in the court of Devonshire House; there are horses tethered in Green Park, soldiers drilling in Hyde Park, trenches dug behind Westminster Cathedral; the smartest hotels and theatres, almost every taxi and bus and many private motors, are pasted with placards summoning every man to enlist for the duration of the war; a once popular delicatessen shop breaks out in despairing proclamations that the proprietor is a naturalized Briton, that it employs no Germans, that its best Frankfurter sausages and Hamburger caviare are manufactured in Islington; it protests so strenuously that already its biggest branch is closed, while the path of the unprotesting German about the Court or in the City is all pleasantness and peace. And the old Gambrinus, the haunt of artists, has become a Café-Brasserie, the Vienna Café a British and Continental Restaurant. The most fastidious artdealers in Bond Street display in their windows Calls to Arms or portraits of Kitchener and Nelson; Baedeker’s three-starred masterpieces have disappeared from national collections. The courtyard of Burlington House is a drilling ground for the elderly artists in white sweaters, who call themselves the ‘Roaring Forties’ and are called by the refused the ‘Back Numbers,’ and who are to help defend London should the need arise. And everywhere is something different, something startling, something incredible.

If I go farther afield, I find the White City at Shepherd’s Bush turned into barracks, the Alexandra Palace into a home for Belgians, the Crystal Palace into an annex to the Admiralty, and every open space, from Hampstead Heath to Clapham Common, a drilling ground — a battlefield in the popular conception. ‘ Is Mr. Blank in?’ a friend of mine asked a clerk in an office the other day. ‘Oh no, sir, he’s gone out of town,’ was the answer. ‘When will he be back?’ ‘Can’t say, sir; he’s at the front.’ ‘At the front! But where?’ ‘Clapham Common, sir!’

If I leave the streets to go into the shops, the offices, the houses which I know best, I am as sure to run up against the unexpected. At my tailor’s, when I ask timidly to have my last winter’s gown cleaned and pressed, I am assured that, really, it would not seem ‘quite nice’ to be getting new gowns just now. At my bank I discover a woman typist installed for the first time. At the big Regent Street shops, if I look for the latest modes, I am shown ‘comforts for the soldiers.’ My way into big Oxford Street shops is blocked by people staring at war-photographs and war-bulletins in the windows. The woman who sold me flowers has given up because nobody comes to buy them; the man who sold me salads in winter can give me none for love or money, because for love or money he can get none from Belgium or France. At the theatre the women on either side of me knit steadily, as they do in the bus that takes me there. When I call to see my friends on their afternoons, baskets with big red crosses litter their halls, and in their drawingrooms everybody is sewing shirts, — an amusement in which I decline to join out of consideration for the soldiers. Other friends whom I knew as models of domesticity I never find at all, their every minute being now spent in committee rooms or at committee meetings.

And this reminds me that more unexpected than anything in my friends’ houses is the new development in ours, where the women in the offices below, who used to frighten London by fighting for themselves, now leave the fighting to the men, and in Aid or Auxiliary Corps charge themselves with the care of women and children. In fact, the longer the war goes on, the more evident it is to me that ‘Business as Unusual’ is the sign that should be hung everywhere in London.

V

I feel the change most keenly at night, when London has grown beautiful as it never was before, — and, I suppose, as I should hope it will never be again. It has always been very wonderful from our windows, which overlook the wide sweep of the Thames between St. Paul’s and Westminster, though of late years the river had become almost too brilliant, yielding up its shadowy secrets to the new electric glare. The Embankment and the bridges were great circles and lines of light; every double-decked tram was a chariot of light, every boat a beacon of light; Big Ben showed the hours on a face of light; the walls and towers on the opposite shores advertised teas and whiskies in flashes of light. The worst offense was the tower facing us, covered, and after dark illuminated, from top to bottom, by a horribly realistic picture and as horribly vulgar letters, bad enough as an advertisement of tea, but a crime as an advertisement of the centre of London to a hostile airman approaching from Dover or the Surrey Hills. The danger was finally realized, and at last an unlit tower, a campanile in the night, again faced us. One by one the other advertisements up and down the Thames vanished. Big Ben went out. Half the number of lights burned on the Embankment and the bridges. The double-decked trams drew their blinds and the taxis’ lights grew dim. The Hotel Cecil pulled the curtains together in the rose-lit dining-room. And mystery returned to the river; once more, with the lights dwindled into vague points of gold, it flowed in dimly revealed beauty into the shadows.

There is, however, one short half hour after this darkness has fallen, when the river is lit up with a splendor I could never have imagined. From Charing Cross, from Lambeth, from Whitehall, from St. Paul’s, from Cannon Street, from still farther beyond, long threads, great cones and cylinders, wide shafts, short plumes of light sweep the heavens, the water, and the town; now flooding the Thames and its shores; now bringing out in strong relief the dome of St. Paul’s or the towers of Westminster; now transforming the commonplace group of hotels and clubs in Northumberland Avenue into a fantastic mediæval town; now shooting out in long parallel shining lines to the north and the east; now meeting overhead in a soft, swaying mass of fleecy golden cloud; and always searching, until I feel that they could not search so hard were there not something to search for. For their beauty will not let me forget that their message is danger. The evening they began their search, Augustine told me that, for the first time since the war began, she was frightened; and I could understand.

All the town now, from dusk to dawn, is shrouded in darkness — half the street lights out and the other half under black shades, blinds and curtains drawn everywhere, awnings let down above shop-windows, the lamps of busses and taxis and trams burning low, not an advertisement flashing light anywhere.

Although getting about after dusk has grown perilous, although it is affirmed that the darkness is more fatal than a raid of Zeppelins or Taubes, I am never in a hurry to go home, often taking the longest way for the sheer wonder of it: to see Bond Street — once on a winter afternoon the most brilliant street in London — as dim as an alley, Piccadilly Circus an island of darkness, Trafalgar Square steeped in gloom, national galleries and museums unsubstantial shadows, theatres and restaurants and hotels opening in funereal gloom, the Strand dull as a Bayswater terrace; and then, as I get nearer home, suddenly over the house-tops, stretching across street and square, the threads and cones and cylinders and shafts and plumes of light pointing north and east, meeting overhead, busy at their task of searching, giving me again the thrill of conviction that they could not search so diligently were there not something to search for, — a conviction that London shares but does not allow to interfere with its pleasures, even now that civilians are officially informed how to act when the lights no longer search in vain and the bomb falls.

London closes its public houses and goes to bed at ten; at eleven its streets are as silent and deserted as the streets of a provincial town. But this new London of dim distances and glimmering lights and old churches and buildings like pale ghosts against the sky, and mystery everywhere, and long nights of silence, has taken on a beauty so rare and fine that I almost dread the time when peace will set it alight again.

VI

I must not give the impression that London is to be enjoyed as a sort of glorified Drury Lane spectacle. Each of its shifting scenes is too eloquent of the tragedy that is its real cause and meaning; like the searchlights, each is heavy-laden with the message of danger or sorrow or horror. I may smile as I stop to look at the middle-aged artists drilling while the crowd from Piccadilly, in the dusk of the winter afternoon, drift into the courtyard to watch; but the smile ends in a sigh, for I know that art is the first luxury the world can do without, that already more than one artist is dependent on funds which he of old was the first to contribute to, and that so it is also with musicians, and actors, and writers, with the men of all professions that deal in beauty. I may smile at my tailor’s deference to the ‘quite nice,’ but there too a sigh goes with the smile, for the idle hands in the workroom, for the skilled workers, artists too in their way, thrown upon the charity they shrink from.

It is to the business of the Centre and the West of London that the war has been most cruel. I read in the papers of busy scenes now at the docks, of busy factories turning out khaki, of busy workrooms fashioning it into uniforms, of the decrease of crime and unemployment in the East End, usually the first part of London to suffer from hard times. But the essentials of war, the essentials of commerce, the essentials of life, must be had at any price; the unessential, the superfluous, the luxury of any kind must be sacrificed, if sacrifice is called for. Of course business does continue in the West. Shops have not closed; publishers have no more empty hours to waste with us; there are picture-shows open in the galleries; tailors and dressmakers have not gone bankrupt. A brave face is turned to the public. But many a flaunting sign of ‘Business as Usual,’ many an impressive display of modes and models, conceals a costly idleness and want as sad as can be found from one end of London to the other. And if the West is now the first to suffer, it will be the last part of London to which relief will come. The English understand better how to contribute to funds than how to distribute them. Besides, when money is to be distributed tradition sends it flowing into the East, sure that the West is rich enough to take care of itself.

If London has settled down to the great fact of the war, London cannot forget it. Every day that haunting message of danger and sorrow and horror is brought to it with fresh poignancy. Just as I see nothing save war in the aspect of the town, so I hear nothing save war in the talk about me. And friends who came so gayly in August to show themselves to us in khaki are coming back again to show themselves limping, their arms in slings, their hands bandaged, and in their faces the story of what they have gone through. Those who came with the red cross on their arms are strangers who return only during rare hours off duty from their too busy hospitals.

Nor is it possible to be in London and not to see the Belgians a little nearer than arriving at Charing Cross and bowing in the streets. Always after this the very name of Belgium must bring back to me memories of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, on autumn afternoons: the autumn gold fading from the sky, the bare branches of the trees in the great court black with starlings flying home to roost and filling the air with their chatter; and under the trees and up in the airy, spacious wards, Belgian soldiers with heads, arms, legs swathed in bandages, and no thought save for the day when they could once more take up the fight and help drive the Germans out of their country. Other memories are of Belgian artists forgetting for one moment, as they looked out on the Thames from our studio windows, their own deserted studios, the unfinished canvases, the forgotten paints; and of Belgian professors who, had they stayed at home, would have been obliged to be civil to the Germans, and who preferred to do their work free of such obligations in the British Museum; and an occasional deputy, or minister, or correspondent of L’Indépendance Belge, toiling for the day when Belgium will be Belgium again, if with its old towns laid low and its ancient beauty desecrated. The Belgians are and will be remembered as one of the most tragic features in the tragic spectacle of London — sad with the sadness of a people in exile.