“You don’t mean to tell me,” said the Critic, “that a nation like Germany—­I’m talking now about the people, the country that has been the hot bed of Socialism,—­will stand for a war of invasion?”

That started the Doctor off.  He flayed the theorists, the people who reasoned with their emotions and not their brains, the mob that looked at externals, and never saw the fires beneath, the throng that was unable to understand anything outside its own horizon, the mass that pretended to read the history of the world, and because it changed its clothes imagined that it had changed its spirit.

“Why, I’ve lived in Germany,” he cried.  “I was educated there.  I know them.  I have the misfortune to understand them.  They’ll stick together and Socialism go hang—­as long as there is a hope of victory.  The Confederation was cemented in the blood of victory.  It can only be dissolved in the blood of defeat.  They are a great, a well-disciplined, and an obedient people.”

“One would think you admired them and their military system,” remarked the Critic, a bit crest-fallen at the attack.

“I may not, but I’ll tell you one sure thing if you want a good circus you’ve got to train your animals.  The Kaiser has been a corking ringmaster.”

Of course this got a laugh, and though both Critic and Journalist tried to strike fire again with words like “democracy” and “civilization,” the Doctor had cooled down, and nothing could stir him again that night.

Still the discord had been sown.  I suppose the dinner-table talk was only a sample of what was going on, in that month, all over the world.  It did not help matters that as the days went on we all realized that the Doctor had been right—­that France was to be invaded, not across her own proper frontier, but across unprotected Belgium.  This seemed so atrocious to most of us that indignation could only express itself in abuse.  There was not a night that the dinner-table talk was not bitter.  You see the Doctor did not expect the world ever to be perfect—­did not know that he wanted it to be—­believed in the struggle.  On the other hand the Critic, and in a certain sense the Journalist, in spite of their experiences, were more or less Utopian, and the Sculptor and the Violinist purely spectators.

No need to go into the details of the heated arguments.  They were only the echo of what all the world,—­that had cradled itself into the belief that a great war among the great nations had become, for economic as well as humanitarian reasons, impossible,—­were, I imagine, at this time saying.

As nearly as I can remember it was on August 20th that the climax came.  Liege had fallen.  The English Expedition had landed, and was marching on Belgium.  A victorious German army had goose-stepped into defenseless Brussels, and was sweeping out toward the French frontier.  The French advance into Alsace had been a blunder.

The Doctor remarked that “the English had landed twelve days too late,” and the Journalist drew a graphic, and purely imaginary, picture of the pathos of the Belgians straining their eyes in vain to the West for the coming of the men in khaki, and unfortunately he let himself expatiate a bit on German methods.