An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

206 AUTOBIOGRAPHY On the 18th July Red Smith took me and others. including Miss Russell (a very interesting old Irish lady), Mrs. B. Harmer, and one of the Lynn officials, in a motor launch to Coldham Hall. At the Cromer Meeting I had a very long, tiring, expensive day, but did 83, the best this year. The :first green fig was ripe this year on the 22nd July. On the 23rd I had to go to London for two days to swear a corrective affidavit, and lunched at Simpson's as usual. On the 1st of August I shot a fair dozen, 8 for 37, the best this year. Arthur and Mabel came down on the 1st of August, and we motored over to Rollesby when we heard war had been declared. Like most Englishmen I did not, at first, realise the immense importance of the matter. We could not understand why the Germans, who were in the fair way of annexing all the profitable business of the world by their methodical habits, should want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, and run enormous risks to gratify a militant taste which we did not think was shared by the common people of Germany. In fact, we all thought that as soon as the Emperor insisted on the necessarily immense sacrifices his people would turn and rend him. That a whole nation, men and women alike, could be impregnated with war instincts, and with rabid bate of a country which had never done them any harm, did not strike us as being possible, and that individual soldiers could commit the atrocities they afterwards did seemed absolutely impossible, but time has shown how wrong we were. Ou Monday, the 3rd of August, we bad a picnic at Cawston Rifle Range. On the 15th I drove the H.B.'~ back by Drayton, but found the "Red Lion" full of Ennis– killens, and another regiment bivouacked in the Priory. On the 18th I shot decently in public at the East Dereham Meeting, doing 8 and 17 = 25, or 113 in all. F.G.R. came on the 18th, and I rode with him to Horning Ferry and back, he going on eventually to Beccles. On the 27th Augu t I found the " Black Boys" at Aylsham had been taken over by the military, the Hon. Lionel Rothschild there acting as a sort of Commissary General, a pleasant little man, who remembered my pheasant episode years before at Cassiobury. Friday the 28th was the day of the alleged passing through England of immense Russian reinforcements. I can't say I saw them (!).