She rose from her writing-chair and touched him by the arm.

“Robert!” she appealed.

“Oh, yes—­’What is the matter with me?’ . . .  Nothing—­or, in other words, Everything—­that is to say, this War.”

“It’s terrible, of course; but I don’t see—­” She broke off.  “Is it the War itself that upsets you, or the little we can do to help?  If that’s your trouble, why, of course it was silly of me to worry you just now about my being nervous of facing these people.  But we’re only at the beginning—­”

“Agatha!” The Vicar drew a hand from his pocket, laid it on his wife’s shoulder, and looked her in the eyes.  “Don’t I know that, if the call came, you would face a platoon?  It’s I who am weak.  This War—­” He stared out of the window again.

“It is a just War, if ever there was one. . . .  Robert, you don’t doubt that, surely!  Forced on us—­Why, you yourself used to warn me, when I little heeded, that the Germans were preparing it, that ‘the Day’ must come sooner or later:  for they would have it so.”

“That’s true enough.”

“So positive about it as you were then, proving to me that their Naval Estimates could spell nothing else! . . .  And now that it has come, what is the matter with us? Have we provoked it?  Have we torn up treaties?  Had you, a week ago—­had any one we know-the smallest desire for it?”

“Before God, we had not.  The English people—­I will swear to it, in this corner of the land—­had no more quarrel with the Germans than I have with you at this moment.  Why, we saw how the first draft—­the Naval Reservists—­went off last Sunday.  In a kind of stupor, they were.  But wars are made by Governments, Agatha; never by peoples.”

“And our Government—­much as I detest them for their behaviour to the Welsh Church—­our Government worked for peace up to the last.”

“I honestly believe they did.  I am sure they did . . . up to the last, as you say.  The question is, Were they glad or sorry when they didn’t bring it off?”

“Robert!”

“I am trying—­as we shall all have to try—­to look at things as they are.  This trouble has been brewing ever since the South African War, . . . and for ten years at least Germany has been shaping up for a quarrel which we have hoped to decline.  On a hundred points of preparation they are ready and we are not; they have probably sown this idle nation with their spies as they sowed France before 1870:  they make no more bones about a broken oath or two to-day than they made about forging the Ems telegram.  They are an unpleasant race,—­ the North Germans, at least—­and an uncivilised—­”

“They make the most appalling noises with their soup. . . .  Do you remember that German baron at the table d’hote at Genoa?”

“The point is that, with all their thoroughness in plotting, they have no savoir faire; they are educated beyond the capacity of their breeding; and the older, lazier, civilised nations have—­as the saying is—­caught the barbarian stiff.  It is—­as you choose to look at it—­a tragedy of tactlessness or a triumph of tact; and for our time, anyway, the last word upon the Church of Christ—­call it Eastern or Western, Roman, Lutheran, or Anglican.”