London, the capital of a great empire, now looks very deserted and forlorn without its child life. I drove through many of its streets and they were empty of traffic and crowds. It "was like a besieged city. Up above glittered hundreds of kite balloons, silver in the blue sky as once I saw them, though not so many, above our lines in France and Flanders, Newly recruited policemen in steel helmets stood under archways. Sentries outside the Palace and Marlborough House had steel shelters for sentry boxes, How different now from that London of 1914, with its excited, cheering crowds, its crowded restaurants, its fleets of hansom cabs klop-kloping down Piceadily and Pall Mall! But there is only one thing, really, which matters. Is the spirit of British youth the same? Have they the courage of their fathers? Will they go through this war, with its infernal ordeal, calling for desperate will power with the same dogged courage and resolution as those who fought from 1914 onward?
There were people who did not think so. The Germans were told in every lecture, every book, every newspaper that the youth of Britain were decadent and effete, that. they had lost their traditions and the will to defend their national heritage.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.