and threatening—­and nice old gentlemen with white moustaches and fathers of families scheming and planning to burn houses and kill and hurt and terrify.  And nice young women, too, looking for an Englishman to spit at; I tell you I’ve been within range and very uncomfortable several times....  And what one can’t believe is that they are really doing these things.  There’s a little village called Vise near the Dutch frontier; some old chap got fooling there with a fowling-piece; and they’ve wiped it out.  Shot the people by the dozen, put them out in rows three deep and shot them, and burnt the place.  Short of scalping, Red Indians couldn’t have done worse.  Respectable German soldiers....

“No one in England really seems to have any suspicion what is going on in Belgium.  You hear stories—­People tell them in Holland.  It takes your breath away.  They have set out just to cow those Belgians.  They have started in to be deliberately frightful.  You do not begin to understand....  Well....  Outrages.  The sort of outrages Americans have never heard of.  That one doesn’t speak of....  Well....  Rape....  They have been raping women for disciplinary purposes on tables in the market-place of Liege.  Yes, sir.  It’s a fact.  I was told it by a man who had just come out of Belgium.  Knew the people, knew the place, knew everything.  People over here do not seem to realise that those women are the same sort of women that you might find in Chester or Yarmouth, or in Matching’s Easy for the matter of that.  They still seem to think that Continental women are a different sort of women—­more amenable to that sort of treatment.  They seem to think there is some special Providential law against such things happening to English people.  And it’s within two hundred miles of you—­even now.  And as far as I can see there’s precious little to prevent it coming nearer....”

Mr. Britling thought there were a few little obstacles.

“I’ve seen the new British army drilling in London, Mr. Britling.  I don’t know if you have.  I saw a whole battalion.  And they hadn’t got half-a-dozen uniforms, and not a single rifle to the whole battalion.

“You don’t begin to realise in England what you are up against.  You have no idea what it means to be in a country where everybody, the women, the elderly people, the steady middle-aged men, are taking war as seriously as business.  They haven’t the slightest compunction.  I don’t know what Germany was like before the war, I had hardly gotten out of my train before the war began; but Germany to-day is one big armed camp.  It’s all crawling with soldiers.  And every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his kit.