Fighting, as old Anna knew well, though most of the people about her were ignorant of the fact, requires a certain apprenticeship, an apprenticeship of which these pleasant-spoken, strong, straight-limbed young Englishmen knew nothing. The splendidly trained soldiers of the Fatherland would have fought and conquered long before peaceful, sleepy England knew what war really meant. There was great comfort in that thought.
As that second Saturday of August wore itself away, it is not too much to say that the most interesting thing connected with the War which had happened in Witanbury Close was the fact that Jervis Blake was now going to be a soldier. When people met that day, coming and going about their business, across the lawn-like green, and along the well-kept road which ran round it, they did not discuss the little news there was in that morning's papers. Instead they at once informed one another, and with a most congratulatory air, "Jervis Blake has heard from the War Office! He is going into the Army after all. Mr. and Mrs. Robey are _so_ pleased. The whole family went to the station with him this morning!"
And it was quite true that the Robeys were pleased. Mr. Robey was positively triumphant. "I can't tell you how glad I am!" he said, first to one, and then to the other, of his neighbours. "Young Blake will make a splendid company officer. It's for the sake of the country, quite as much as for his sake, and for that of his unpleasant father, that I'm glad. What sort of book-learning had Napoleon's marshals? Or, for the matter of that, Wellington's officers in the Peninsula, and at Waterloo?"
As the day went on, and he began receiving telegrams from those of his young men--they were not so very many after all--who had failed to pass, containing the joyful news that now they were accepted, his wife, instead of rejoicing, began to look grave. "It seems to me, my dear, that our occupation in life will now be gone," she said soberly. And he answered lightly enough, "Sufficient unto the day is the good thereof!" And being the high-minded, sensible fellow that he was, he would allow no selfish fear of the future to cloud his satisfaction in the present.
The only jarring note that day came from James Hayley. He had had to take a later train than he had thought to do, and he only arrived at the Trellis House, duly dressed for dinner, just before eight.