black indeed.  ‘He will be disavowed,’ every one said over here, but in less than twenty-four hours those who knew anything knew that the crisis was on us—­only their knowledge came too late.  ’War between two such civilised and enlightened nations is an impossibility,’ one of our leaders of public opinion had declared on the Saturday; by the following Friday the war had indeed become an impossibility, because we could no longer carry it on.  It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we were just not enough, everywhere where the pressure came.  Our ships were good against their ships, our seamen were better than their seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority in aircraft.  Our trained men were good against their trained men, but they could not be in several places at once, and the enemy could.  Our half-trained men and our untrained men could not master the science of war at a moment’s notice, and a moment’s notice was all they got.  The enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice:  we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while.  There was courage enough running loose in the land, but it was like unharnessed electricity, it controlled no forces, it struck no blows.  There was no time for the heroism and the devotion which a drawn-out struggle, however hopeless, can produce; the war was over almost as soon as it had begun.  After the reverses which happened with lightning rapidity in the first three days of warfare, the newspapers made no effort to pretend that the situation could be retrieved; editors and public alike recognised that these were blows over the heart, and that it was a matter of moments before we were counted out.  One might liken the whole affair to a snap checkmate early in a game of chess; one side had thought out the moves, and brought the requisite pieces into play, the other side was hampered and helpless, with its resources unavailable, its strategy discounted in advance.  That, in a nutshell, is the history of the war.”

Yeovil was silent for a moment or two, then he asked: 

“And the sequel, the peace?”

“The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory.  No one had quite realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation with a closely packed population.  The conquerors were in a position to dictate what terms they pleased, and it was not wonderful that their ideas of aggrandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication.  There was no European combination ready to say them nay, and certainly no one Power was going to be rash enough to step in to contest the terms of the treaty that they imposed on the conquered.  Annexation had probably never been a dream before the war; after the war it suddenly became temptingly practical.  Warum nicht? became the theme of leader-writers in the German press; they pointed out that Britain, defeated