Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/116

 in a month. It was almost as if Great Britain had ceased to be a nation and become a family.

 GREAT SCENES IN GREAT BRITAIN N did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink and the temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At the darkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tour in a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though my journey lay through three or four of the least industrial and most placid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand. The high roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; the broad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stations or depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the hay crop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemed to be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who had nothing left to do but to wait for death.

The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large hoardings on the face of a public building recorded in golden letters the  112