Prophets of finance, prophets of the labour world, had told us the thing was impossible.

Even our most recent experience, the irruption of armed forces into the political arena, had contributed to fix in our minds the view that all armaments were merely _in terrorem_, part of a gigantic game of bluff.
In a world organized as was Europe in 1914 on the basis of universal military service, it is dangerous, not only materially but morally and intellectually, to be as the people of these islands were, segregated from all military experience.

We were almost like children in a magazine of explosives: we knew, of course, that there were dangerous substances about us; but we did not realize how suddenly and irretrievably the whole thing might go off.
I do not know how Redmond gauged the situation.

But he spent the end of the week in town, and must have been less unprepared than was one like myself, who during the Saturday, Sunday and the Monday Bank Holiday was away in a most peaceful country-side, remote from news.

Even on the Tuesday, the instant bearing on our own questions and our own lives of what we read in the newspapers was not clear to me.