In the Scriptorium, two of the newer assistants began to spend their breaks talking about coming face-to-face with the Kaiser and winning the war before it could start. They were young and pale and thin. They wore spectacles, and if they’d been in any fights at all they would have been awkward scraps over library books or proper grammar. Neither could approach Dr. Murray without a hesitant step and a stutter, so I judged them unlikely to persuade the Kaiser to give up Belgium. The older assistants had more sober conversations, their faces darkening in a way that rarely occurred during their disagreements about words. Mr. Rawlings had lost a brother in the Boer War, and he told the younger men that there was no glory in killing. They nodded, polite. They didn’t notice the waver in his voice, and before he was out of earshot they were talking again about the particulars of joining up, wondering how long they would have to train before they were sent into the fray. Mr. Rawlings bent under the weight of it.

“This war is going to slow the Dictionary down,” I heard Mr. Maling say to Dr. Murray. “It’s a gun they want in their hand, not a pencil.”

From then on, I woke every morning with a dread fear.

No one slept on the night of August 3rd, even if they took to their beds and tried. Our two young assistants travelled to London and spent the balmy night carousing in Pall Mall, waiting for word that Germany had withdrawn from Belgium. It didn’t come. As Big Ben chimed the first hour of a new day, they sang “God save the King.”

The next day, they returned to the Scriptorium full of a bravado that didn’t suit them. They approached Dr. Murray together and told him they had volunteered. “Both of you are short-sighted and unfit,” I heard Dr. Murray say. “You’d do more good for your country if you stayed here.”

It was impossible to concentrate, so I rode to the Press. I’d never known it to be so quiet. In the composing room, only half the benches had a man standing at them.

“Just two?” Gareth said, when I told him what had happened at the Scriptorium. “Sixty-three men marched out of the Press this morning. Most were volunteers in the Territorial Force, but not all. There would have been sixty-five, except Mr. Hart pulled two out by the collars who he knew to be underage. Said he’d give them a hiding after their mothers had.”

Mr. Maling was right: the war slowed the Dictionary down. Within a few months, there were only women and old men left in the Scriptorium. Mr. Rawlings, who was not quite old, had left because of a nervous complaint, and there was a space at the end of the sorting table once more. No one filled it.