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that. In them days you either were a servant or you had some servants yourself, and there was big houses where the grander servants had servants themselves, and every family had its own way, and ours was all right, if you ask me.

7
Now God Be Thanked Who Has Matched us with His Hour
    I had felt a kind of loneliness, in amongst all that joyful and righteous patriotism. There didn’t seem any chance of America joining in. It wasn’t our scrap. I was a Yank from Baltimore, I was twenty-five years old and I hadn’t made any mark in the world since leaving school. There I’d been brilliant, especially in athletics, but afterwards I’d never managed anything much. My father was in shipping, and I was working in his office with a view to taking over when he eventually packed it in. There was no sign of that. If he lived to be a hundred he would still be in charge. I was chaffing for some action.
    My fondest memory of the outbreak of the war, however, was the reaction of Mrs McCosh. I came to The Grampians the morning after the ultimatum ran out, and she was in a considerable tizz. She was wringing her hands in the drawing room, exclaiming, ‘We can’t possibly be at war with Germany, we just can’t, it’s not possible. The Kaiser is the grandson of the Queen!’
    Of course she meant Queen Victoria, not Alexandra or Mary. By ‘the Queen’ she always meant Victoria, and the other two were referred to as ‘Queen Alexandra’ and ‘the present Queen’. She had a touching faith that royal alliances must inevitably prevent wars, unless someone along the line was mad. In retrospect I wonder if she was right; you’d have to be mad to plunge the whole of Europe into war quite deliberately. And the Kaiser was the son of the Princess Royal. He can’t have had any family-feeling at all.
    Like everyone else I shared in the ecstasy and euphoria when war broke out. Like everyone else, I went to Buckingham Palace and Downing Street and we cheered and sang the British national anthem until we were all hoarse. We sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ to the King when he appeared on the balcony. I sang myheart out even though I’m a Yank. He was dressed as an Admiral of the Fleet, and Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales came out too. We waved our hats and jostled each other, and men who were unacquainted shook hands and clapped each other on the back. I came over in a strange sweat of enthusiasm. The ultimatum was to expire at eleven, so we made our way to Whitehall, and I had my first taste of fighting. I got into a sort of jostling match with a protester just by Nelson’s Column, who carried a placard saying ‘This Is Not Our War’.
    It was though. It was all very simple. The Kaiser had invaded France without even properly declaring war, and invaded Belgium. It was said that the Germans had brought in one and a half million men by rail. There wasn’t any moral doubt in any of us. It was absolutely clear that Germany was in the wrong, and had broken a treaty it had signed up to a long time ago. We had to put a stop to them, and that was that. I don’t think we would have been as pleased about a war that wasn’t so obviously just, or against an enemy that hadn’t done anything outrageous. We’d heard about the French officer they’d torn apart with horses. We’d all been insulted too, by the Kaiser saying that our offer to mediate between the Austrians and the Serbs was just ‘British insolence’. It made us all want to go out and give him a bashing. It turned out that the Germans actually had a policy of terrorising the French speakers of Belgium; it was called ‘Schrecklichkeit’, but we didn’t find out until much later.
    No one came out of Number Ten when Big Ben struck twelve, and we all knew we were at war. We sang ‘God Save the King’ with heartfelt emotion, and then we dispersed, very much in a hurry to get home and share the news.
    But more important to me than all this, was that I was in love with Rosie,