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fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some café turc at the end of his lunch.
    “Monsieur veut dire Café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.
    I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and in its second phase.  But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism.  As to alarm, I pointed out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary.  It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions.  But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively.  It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing — a sort of thing I am not capable of.  Rather than be thought a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments.  It was pointed out to me that these Eastern nations were not far removed from a savage state.  Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding the pigs.  The highly-developed material civilisation of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a war.  The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.
    Very plausible all this sounded.  War does not pay.  There had been a book written on that theme — an attempt to put pacificism on a material basis.  Nothing more solid in the way of argument could have been advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe.  War was “bad business!”  This was final.
    But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world.  Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret them correctly.  The most innocent of passions will take the edge off one’s judgment.  The desire which possessed me was simply the desire to travel.  And that being so it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the Continent.  My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there.  My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.
    In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but within the Russian frontier.  The enterprise at first seemed to me considerable.  Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made.  I confess that my first impulse about a projected journey is to leave it alone.  But the invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings.  Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life.  It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of that age.  It was within those historical walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence.  It was like the experience of another world.  The wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth.  I feared.  But fear in itself may become a fascination.  Men have gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight — just to see what would happen.  And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine.  Neither would it be pursued alone.  The invitation was extended to us all.  This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe.  My present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past.