The declaration of war was like
thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was
an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped.
That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it
was.
Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing.
I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral State. I had money in a
bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A
hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the
railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note.
What had seemed money was not money.
Values were told in terms of bread.
It was a swift and immediate return to the economic conditions of
barbarism. Metals were hoarded; and where there had been trade there was
barter. And it all happened in an hour, in that first fierce panic of
war.
Traffic stopped with a clang as of rusty iron. The mailed fist had
dislocated the complex machinery of European traffic. Frontiers which
had been mere landmarks of travel became suddenly formidable and
impassable barriers, guarded by harsh, hysterical men with bayonets.
War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbish! It fills them with the
cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of
battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the
German frontier--and I dare say every other frontier--in the first
stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria.
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