The Spectator

'Distraction', from The Spectator, 5 September 1914: EVER since the world began great trouble has been surrounded by ceremonial. From age to age the ceremonial changes. It tends to become a bondage or a hypocrisy, and bold social reformers step in, as they think, to destroy it, but immediately it appears again in a new form. Modern mourning is the sackcloth and ashes of the past. The grave tone in which we address the afflicted, though their trouble touch us but little, is as much a ceremonial as was the wailing of the ancient Jewish sympathizer. The Psalmist was greatly aggrieved because, when his false friends were in distress, he "humbled himself," and his politeness was disregarded.

The Giving up of Louvain to 'Military Execution', from The Spectator, 5 September 1914: GERMANY has dealt herself the hardest blow which she has yet suffered in the war. By burning Louvain, killing we know not how many of its inhabitants, and turning the rest (say nearly forty thousand men, women, and children) adrift in the fields and on the pillaged countryside, she has forfeited the consideration of decent men. She has committed a deed which two centuries of exemplary conduct could scarcely efface. "German" must for a long time to come be almost synonymous with those epithets of nationality which we use to denote barbaric behaviour, particularly barbarism directed against a cultured conception of life. Germany must henceforth occupy a place with the Vandals and the Huns.

The Spectator, 29 August 1914: THE loafers in London look more pitiable than ever. The best have enlisted, and the rest are drinking to their good fortune and safe return. In the poorer streets a kind of holiday atmosphere prevails, and a sort of excitement which is in a measure pleasurable fills the air. The children rush out of school eager to go on playing at soldiers. The smallest boys tie tin cans about their persons and beat them with hoop-sticks as they march. In the byways of poor neighbourhoods London is still the London of thirty years ago. There is not much traffic. It is still possible to walk in the road if the street happens to be unusually full of people, and the children swarm in apparently greater number than where the traffic drives them to take cover indoors.