somewhat trying.
It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of

the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.
The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man

existed. I remembered only that not long before he had visited
London. The recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant

printed words his presence in this country provoked.
Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was

Archducal, dynastic, purelyaccidental. Can there be in the world
of real men anything more shadowy than an Archduke? And now he was

no more; removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one
more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. I

connected that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations so little
that I had actually to ask where it had happened. My friend told

me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences
of that grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.

It was with perfect sincerity that I answered "Nothing," and having
a great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, I

dismissed the subject. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act
cruel and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of

a crowd of shadowy Archdukes in the background, out of which one
would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the light

of the European stage. And then, to speak the whole truth, there
was no man capable of forming a judgment who attended so little to

the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more
definite term I must call my mind was fixed upon my own affairs,

not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their
fascinating holiday-promising aspect. I had been obtaining my

information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough
to come down now and then to see us. They arrived with their

pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries
casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my

interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the
Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could

not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one's
attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had

just been looking at a miniaturerehearsal of the great world-
drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what

the future held in store for the Powers of the Old World? Here and
there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility,

while they watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by means of
notes and conferences, the propheticreproduction of its awaiting

fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns,
same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race,

liberation, justice--and the same mood of trivial demonstrations.
One could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg. "You mean

Petrograd," would say the booking clerk. Shortly after the fall of
Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some

CAFE TURC at the end of his lunch.
" Monsieur veut dire Cafe balkanique," the patriotic waiter

corrected him austerely.
I will not say that I had not observed something of that

instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and
in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that

vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of my alarmist
cynicism. As to alarm, I pointed out that fear is natural to man,

and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the
preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of

cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge
of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of

disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty
bearing--a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be

thought a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the
gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It was pointed out to me

that these Eastern nations were not far removed from a savage
state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the

earth and feeding the pigs. The highly-developed material
civilisation of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a

war. The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be
disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the

aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.
Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been

a book written on that theme--an attempt to put pacificism on a
material basis. Nothing more solid in the way of argument could

have been advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe. War
was "bad business!" This was final.

But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the
condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were

heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated
by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or

interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions will take
the edge off one's judgment. The desire which possessed me was

simply the desire to travel. And that being so it would have taken
something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple

trust in the stability of things on the Continent. My sentiment
and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were turned to the

past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and
mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the

darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.
In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to

spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood
of Cracow, but within the Russian frontier. The enterprise at

first seemed to me considerable. Since leaving the sea, to which I
have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there

is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are
made. I confess that my first impulse about a projected journey is

to leave it alone. But the invitation received at first with a
sort of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings.

Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen
months of his life. It was in that old royal and academical city

that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known the
friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of

that age. It was within those historical walls that I began to
understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and

a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by
throwing myself into an unrelated existence. It was like the

experience of another world. The wings of time made a great dusk
over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in

there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many
imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth. I

feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have
gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see

what would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in
sunshine. Neither would it be pursued alone. The invitation was

extended to us all. This journey would have something of a
migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all that

gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in
this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased with the idea

of showing my companions what Polish country life was like; to
visit the town where I was at school before the boys by my side

should grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own,
should lose their unsophisticated interest in mine. It is only in

the short instants of early youth that we have the faculty of
coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the

emotions of another soul. For youth all is reality in this world,
and with justice, since it apprehends so vividly its images behind

which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance.
I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom,

unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have been a fibre
which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories

of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received its
earliest independent impressions.

The first days of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires
hummed with the words of enormousimport which were to fill blue

books, yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of
mankind, passed for us in light-hearted preparations for the

journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany, to get
across as quickly as possible?

Germany is the part of the earth's solid surface of which I know
the least. In all my life I had been across it only twice. I may

well say of it VIDI TANTUM; and the very little I saw was through
the window of a railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys