From ‘Pages of War’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915:
With its darkened lights and sparse traffic, its khaki-dotted clubs and restaurants working at half-pressure, its transformed shop-windows, where everything is “for the front,” London was yet never so absolutely, so intimately itself.
All the distilled essence of the Empire is concentrated here under these foggy skies swept by wheeling searchlights. As though in the full pageant of mid-season, the cream of the shires and bigwigs from the unfamiliar counties pass and repass along pavements where no alien jostles them off the kerb, magnetized every one of them from their homes by haunting, mute anxiety to keep their finger on the pulse of the world’s supreme news-centre.
There has even sprung up a sort of silent freemasonry among these pilgrims indecently and irresistibly wrenched from their normal land-owning existence.
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