“But perhaps I can arrange a meeting for you with a friend,” she added, “who will be better able to help you, if he is in Paris.  I will let you know.”

She told Joan what she remembered herself of 1870.  She had turned her country house into a hospital and had seen a good deal of the fighting.

“It would not do to tell the truth, or we should have our children growing up to hate war,” she concluded.

She was as good as her word, and sent Joan round a message the next morning to come and see her in the afternoon.  Joan was introduced to a Monsieur de Chaumont.  He was a soldierly-looking gentleman, with a grey moustache, and a deep scar across his face.

“Hanged if I can see how we are going to get out of it,” he answered Joan cheerfully.  “The moment there is any threat of war, it becomes a point of honour with every nation to do nothing to avoid it.  I remember my old duelling days.  The quarrel may have been about the silliest trifle imaginable.  A single word would have explained the whole thing away.  But to utter it would have stamped one as a coward.  This Egyptian Tra-la-la!  It isn’t worth the bones of a single grenadier, as our friends across the Rhine would say.  But I expect, before it’s settled, there will be men’s bones sufficient, bleaching on the desert, to build another Pyramid.  It’s so easily started:  that’s the devil of it.  A mischievous boy can throw a lighted match into a powder magazine, and then it becomes every patriot’s business to see that it isn’t put out.  I hate war.  It accomplishes nothing, and leaves everything in a greater muddle than it was before.  But if the idea ever catches fire, I shall have to do all I can to fan the conflagration.  Unless I am prepared to be branded as a poltroon.  Every professional soldier is supposed to welcome war.  Most of us do:  it’s our opportunity.  There’s some excuse for us.  But these men—­Carleton and their lot:  I regard them as nothing better than the Menades of the Commune.  They care nothing if the whole of Europe blazes.  They cannot personally get harmed whatever happens.  It’s fun to them.”

“But the people who can get harmed,” argued Joan.  “The men who will be dragged away from their work, from their business, used as ’cannon fodder.’”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Oh, they are always eager enough for it, at first,” he answered.  “There is the excitement.  The curiosity.  You must remember that life is a monotonous affair to the great mass of the people.  There’s the natural craving to escape from it; to court adventure.  They are not so enthusiastic about it after they have tasted it.  Modern warfare, they soon find, is about as dull a business as science ever invented.”

There was only one hope that he could see:  and that was to switch the people’s mind on to some other excitement.  His advices from London told him that a parliamentary crisis was pending.  Could not Mrs. Denton and her party do something to hasten it?  He, on his side, would consult with the Socialist leaders, who might have something to suggest.