In the summer of 1911 immediately after the coronation of King George there came one of those storms of international suspicion that ever and again threaten Europe with war. It seems to have been by some German at Welt-Politik, those privileged of giant bombs who sit at the ears of foreign ministers suggesting wickedness, and it was brewed with a ignorance of nearly every reality in the case. A German without a word of notice seized Agadir on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, within the regions reserved to French influence; an English demand for explanations was uncivilly disregarded and England and France and presently Germany began vigorous preparations for war. All over the world it was supposed that Germany had at last flung down the gauntlet. In England the war party was only too eager to grasp what it considered to be a magnificent opportunity. Heaven knows what the Germans had hoped or intended by their ; the amazing thing to note is that they were not prepared to fight, they had not even the necessary money ready and they could not get it; they had [Pg 319]perhaps never intended to fight, and the autumn saw the danger again into diplomatic bickerings and insincerely pacific professions. But in the high summer the danger had not , and in common with every reasonable man I found myself under the shadow of an that would have been none the less gigantic and because it was an imbecility. It was an occasion when everyone needs must act, however trivially disproportionate his action may be to the danger. I cabled Gidding who was in America to get together whatever influences were available there upon the side of pacific , and I set such British organs as I could control or approach in the same direction. It seemed probable that Italy would be into any conflict that might ensue; it happened that there was to be a Conference of Peace Societies in Milan early in September, and I to go in the not very certain hope that out of that assemblage some form of European protest might be evolved.  
That August I was very much run down. I had been staying in London through almost intolerably hot weather to attend a Races Congress that had greatly disappointed me. I don't know particularly now why I had been disappointed nor how far the feeling was due to my being generally run down by the pressure of work and the stress of thinking about large subjects in little of time. But I know that a kind of despair came over me as I sat and looked at that multicolored assembly and heard in succession the heavy of white men, the slick, thin cleverness of Hindoos, the rich-toned florid of negroes. I lost sight of any germ of splendid possibility in all those people, and saw all too plainly the vanity, the , the self-interests that show up so harshly against the professions of every movement. It seemed all such a windy business against the firm prejudices, the vast accumulated interests that grind race against race. We had no common purpose at all at that conference, no proposal to hold us together. So much of it was like on a hillside....
 
I wanted a holiday badly, and then came this war crisis and I felt unable to go away for any length of time. Even bleating it seemed to me was better than in a crime against humanity. So to get heart to at Milan I snatched at ten days in the Swiss mountains en route. A tour with some taciturn guide involving a few middling climbs and excursions seemed the best way of . I had never had any time for Switzerland since my first exile there years ago. I took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget—if ever I knew it, a dark man with a scar—and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed and delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those interminable uplands of ice. I wished I could have lingered up there. But that is the tragedy of those sunlit desolations; one may not stay; one sees and exclaims and then looks at a watch. I wonder no one has ever taken an arctic equipment up into that , and had a good healing spell of lonely exaltation. I found the descent from the Strahlegg as much of a climb as I was disposed to undertake; for an hour we were coming down frozen snow that wasn't so much a slope as a slightly inclined ....
 
From the Grimsel I went over the Rhone glacier to the inn on the Furka Pass, and then, paying off my guide and becoming a pedestrian, I made my way round by the Schöllenen to Goeschenen, and over the Susten Joch to the Susten Pass and Stein, meaning to to Meiringen.
 
But I still had four days before I went on to Italy, and so I decided to take one more mountain. I slept at the Stein inn, and started in the morning to do that agreeable first mountain of all, the Titlis, whose shining head attracted me. I did not think a guide necessary, but a boy took me up by a track near Gadmen, and left me to my Siegfried map some way up the great of rocks that overlooks the Engstlen Alp. I a little my mountaineering, and it came about that I was while I was still high above the Joch Pass on my descent. Some of this was steep and needed caution. I had to come down slowly with my folding lantern, in which a reluctant candle went out at regular , and I did not reach the little inn at Engstlen Alp until long after eleven at night. By that time I was very tired and hungry.
 
They told me I was lucky to get a room, only one stood vacant; I should certainly not have enjoyed sleeping on a billiard table after my day's work, and I ate a supper, smoked for a time, emptily, and went wearily to bed.
 
But I could not sleep. Usually, I am a good , but ever and again when I have been working too closely or over-exerting myself I have spells of wakefulness, and that night after perhaps an hour's heavy I became thinly alert and very weary in body and spirit, and I do not think I slept again. The pain in my leg that the panther had torn had been rev............