Explore "Good Old Anna" by Marie Belloc Lowndes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
August 23, 1914! A date which will be imprinted on the heart, and on the tablets of memory, of every Englishman and Englishwoman of our generation. To the majority of thinking folk, that was the last Sunday we any of us spent in the old, prosperous, happy, confiding England -- the England who considered that might as a matter of course follows right -- the England whose grand old motto was "Victory as Usual," and to whom the word defeat was without significance.
Almost the whole population of Witanbury seemed to have felt a common impulse to attend the evening service in the cathedral. They streamed in until the stately black-gowned vergers were quite worried to find seats for the late comers. In that great congregation there was already a certain leaven of anxious hearts -- not over-anxious, you understand, but naturally uneasy because those near and dear to them had gone away to a foreign country, to fight an unknown foe.