To the bewildered convalescent all this may well have seemed incredible. It is hardly to be wondered at if he concluded that the fumes of his fever were not yet dispersed, and that this frightful phantasmagoria had been produced, not by external realities, but by the disorders of his own brain.
How long it might have taken to convince him of the truth and substance of these events we may judge from our own recent experience. How long was it after war broke out, before even we, who had watched the trouble brewing through all its stages, ceased to be haunted, even in broad daylight, by the feeling that we were asleep, and that the whole thing was a nightmare which must vanish when we awoke? We were faced (so at least it seemed at frequent moments) not by facts, but by a spectre, and one by no means unfamiliar--the spectre of Europe at war, so long dreaded by some, so scornfully derided by others, so often driven away, of late years so persistently reappearing. But this time the thing refused to be driven away. It sat, hunched up, with its head resting on its hands, as pitiless and inhuman as one of the gargoyles on a Gothic cathedral, staring through us, as if we were merely vapour, at something beyond.
So late as Wednesday, July 29--the day on which Austria declared war on Servia--there was { 16} probably not one Englishman in a hundred who believed it possible that, within a week, his own country would be at war; still less, that a few days later the British Army would be crossing the Channel to assist France and Belgium in repelling a German invasion. To the ordinary man--and not merely to the ordinary man, but equally to the press, and the great majority of politicians--such things were unthinkable until they occurred. Unfortunately, the inability to think a thing is no more a protection against its occurrence than the inability to see a thing gives security to the ostrich.
The sequence of events which led up to the final disaster is of great importance, although very far from being in itself a full explanation of the causes.
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, together with his consort, was murdered by a young Bosnian at Serajevo, not far distant from the southern frontier. The Imperial authorities instituted a secret enquiry into the circumstances of the plot, as a result of which they professed to have discovered that it had been hatched at Belgrade, that Government officials were implicated in it, and that so far from being reprobated, it was approved by Servian public opinion.[1]