"Who can tell? The Prime Minister is going to make a statement on Monday. There have been Cabinet meetings going on all day."

"And what do you think?" she asked.

Quite suddenly, at her question, Michael found himself facing it, even as, when the final catastrophe was more remote, he had faced it with Falbe. All this week he knew he had been looking away from it, telling himself that it was incredible. Now he discovered that the one thing he dreaded more than that England should go to war, was that she should not. The consciousness of national honour, the thing which, with religion, Englishmen are most shy of speaking about, suddenly asserted itself, and he found on the moment that it was bigger than anything else in the world.

"I think we shall go to war," he said. "I don't see personally how we can exist any more as a nation if we don't. We--we shall be damned if we don't, damned for ever and ever. It's moral extinction not to."

"Yes, I know," she said, "that's what I have been telling myself; but, oh, Mike, there's some dreadful cowardly part of me that won't listen when I think of Hermann, and . . ."

"Michael," she said, "what will you do, if there is war?"

He took up her hand that lay on the arm of his chair.

"My darling, how can you ask?" he said. "Of course I shall go back to the army."

(Editor：internet)