The opening of Preface
For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose of July had flamed into splendid bloom. I drew breath, for my task approached its ending, and looked up from the yellowed newspaper records of a great War waged forty-four years ago.
Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes.... Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail.
_For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea. One opal dawn showed the grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a school of submarines. Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights. Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code.