Now I want you to be patient with me and hear me out.  There was a time in the earlier part of this war when it was hard to be patient because there hung over us the dread of losses and disaster.  Now we need dread no longer.  The dreaded thing has happened.  Sitting together as we do in spirit beside the mangled bodies of our dead, surely we can be as patient as the hills.

I want to tell you quite plainly and simply that I think that Germany which is chief and central in this war is most to blame for this war.  Writing to you as an Englishman to a German and with war still being waged, there must be no mistake between us upon this point.  I am persuaded that in the decade that ended with your overthrow of France in 1871, Germany turned her face towards evil, and that her refusal to treat France generously and to make friends with any other great power in the world, is the essential cause of this war.  Germany triumphed—­and she trampled on the loser.  She inflicted intolerable indignities.  She set herself to prepare for further aggressions; long before this killing began she was making war upon land and sea, launching warships, building strategic railways, setting up a vast establishment of war material, threatening, straining all the world to keep pace with her threats....  At last there was no choice before any European nation but submission to the German will, or war.  And it was no will to which righteous men could possibly submit.  It came as an illiberal and ungracious will.  It was the will of Zabern.  It is not as if you had set yourselves to be an imperial people and embrace and unify the world.  You did not want to unify the world.  You wanted to set the foot of an intensely national Germany, a sentimental and illiberal Germany, a Germany that treasured the portraits of your ridiculous Kaiser and his litter of sons, a Germany wearing uniform, reading black letter, and despising every kultur but her own, upon the neck of a divided and humiliated mankind.  It was an intolerable prospect.  I had rather the whole world died.

Forgive me for writing “you.”  You are as little responsible for that Germany as I am for—­Sir Edward Grey.  But this happened over you; you did not do your utmost to prevent it—­even as England has happened, and I have let it happen over me....

“It is so dry; so general,” whispered Mr. Britling.  “And yet—­it is this that has killed our sons.”

He sat still for a time, and then went on reading a fresh sheet of his manuscript.