“Considering that it is blowing half a hurricane and commencing to rain,” he remarked, “the slip of paper which I saw blowing about will be of no use to any one when it is picked up.”

They called the attendant and ordered him to prepare the sleeping berths.  Then they made their way down to the buffet car, and Herr Selingman ordered a bottle of wine.

“We will drink,” he proposed, “to our three countries.  In our way we represent, I think, the industrial forces of the world—­Belgium, England, and Germany.  We are the three countries who stand for commerce and peace.  We will drink prosperity to ourselves and to each other.”

Norgate threw off, with apparent effort, his sleepiness.

“What you have said about our three countries is very true,” he remarked.  “Perhaps as you, Mr. Meyer, are a Belgian, and you, Mr. Selingman, know Belgium well and have connections with it, you can tell me one thing which has always puzzled me.  Why is it that Belgium, which is, as you say, a commercial and peace-loving country, whose neutrality is absolutely guaranteed by three of the greatest Powers in Europe, should find it necessary to have spent such large sums upon fortifications?”

“In which direction do you mean?” Selingman asked, his eyes narrowing a little as he looked across at Norgate.

“The forts of Liege and Namur,” Norgate replied, “and Antwerp.  I know nothing more about it than I gathered from an article which I read not long ago in a magazine.  I had always looked upon Belgium as being outside the pale of possible warfare, yet according to this article it seems to be bristling to the teeth with armaments.”

Herr Selingman cleared his throat.

“I will tell you the reason,” he said.  “You have come to the right man to know.  I am a civilian, but there are few things in connection with my country which I do not understand.  Mr. Meyer here, who is a citizen of Brussels, will bear me out.  It is the book of a clever, intelligent, but misguided German writer which has been responsible for Belgium’s unrest—­Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War—­that and articles of a similar tenor which preceded it.”

“Never read any of them,” Norgate remarked.

“It was erroneously supposed,” Selingman continued, “that Bernhardi represented the dominant military opinion of Germany when he wrote that if Germany ever again invaded France, it would be, notwithstanding her guarantees of neutrality, through Belgium.  Bernhardi was a clever writer, but he was a soldier, and soldiers do not understand the world policy of a great nation such as Germany.  Germany will make no war upon any one, save commercially.  She will never again invade France except under the bitterest provocation, and if ever she should be driven to defend herself, it will assuredly not be at the expense of her broken pledges.  The forts of Belgium might just as well be converted into apple-orchards.  They stand there to-day as the proof of a certain lack of faith in Germany on the part of Belgium, ministered to by that King of the Jingoes, as you would say in English, Bernhardi.  How often it is that a nation suffers most from her own patriots!”