When his beloved again took him to the doctor’s home, he was received by her just as though he really belonged to the family.  She no longer had to hide her nationality.  Freya simply called her Frau Doktor and she, with the glib enthusiasm of the professor, finally succeeded in converting the sailor, explaining to him the right and reason of her country’s entrance into war with half of Europe.

Poor Germany had to defend herself.  The Kaiser was a man of peace in spite of the fact that for many years he had been methodically preparing a military force capable of crushing all humanity.  All the other nations had driven him to it; they had all been the first in aggression.  The insolent French, long before the war, had been sending clouds of aeroplanes over German cities, bombarding them.

Ferragut blinked with surprise.  This was news to him.  It must have occurred while he was on the high seas.  The verbose positiveness of the doctor did not permit any doubt whatever....  Besides, that lady ought to know better than those who lived on the ocean.

Then had arisen the English provocation....  Like a traitor of melodrama, the British government had been preparing the war for a long time, not wishing to show its hand until the last moment; and Germany, lover of peace, had had to defend herself from this enemy, the worst one of all.

“God will punish England!” affirmed the doctor, looking at Ulysses.

And he not wishing to defraud her of her expectations, gallantly nodded his head....  For all he cared, God might punish England.

But in expressing himself in such a way, he felt himself agitated by a new duality.  The English had been good comrades; he remembered agreeably his voyages as an official aboard the British boats.  At the same time, their increasing power, invisible to the men on shore, monstrous for those who were living on the sea, had been producing in him a certain irritation.  He was accustomed to find them either as dominators of all the seas, or else solidly installed on all the strategic and commercial coasts.

The Sector, as though guessing the necessity of arousing his hatred of the great enemy, appealed to his historical memories:  Gibraltar, stolen by the English; the piracies of Drake; the galleons of America seized with methodical regularity by the British fleets; the landings on the coast of Spain that in other centuries had perturbed the life of the peninsula.  England at the beginning of her greatness in the reign of Elizabeth, was the size of Belgium; if she had made herself one of the great powers, it was at the cost of the Spaniards and then of Holland, even dominating the entire world.  And the doctor spoke in English and with so much vehemence about England’s evil deeds against Spain that the impressionable sailor ended by saying spontaneously: 

“May God punish her!”

But just here reappeared the Mediterranean navigator, the complicated and contradictory Ulysses.  He suddenly remembered the repairs on his vessel that must be paid for by England.