ing to demand that. And do you know
what I should have answered?"

Von Wetten threw up his head and his face cleared. "Of course I
know," he said. "You'd have cut the dirty traitor down where he
stood!"

The Baron did not move. "No," he said. "I should have accepted those
terms also, Von Wetten."

The Baron's hand rested on the edge of the table in front of Herr
Haase; he sat, staring at it, a piece of human furniture on the stage
of a tragedy. The other two confronted each other above his patient
and useful head. He would have liked to look from one to the other,
to watch their faces, but he was too deeply drilled for that. He
heard Von Wetten's voice with a quaver in it.

"Then things are going as badly as all that?"

"Yes," answered the Baron. "Badly! It is not just this battle that is
going on now in France; it strikes deeper than that. The plan that
was to give us victory has failed us; we find ourselves, with a
strength which must diminish, fighting an enemy whose strength
increases. We must not stop at anything now; what is at stake is too
tremendous."

"But--."

The Baron hushed him. "Listen, Von Wetten," he said. "I will be
patient with you. I do not speak to you of of the Idea of which
Germany and Prussia are the body and the weapon. No; but have you
ever realized that you, yes, you! belong to the most ridiculed, most
despised nation on earth? That your countrywomen furnish about eighty
per cent. of the world's prostitutes; that a German almost anywhere
is a waiter, or a sausage-manufacturer, or a beer-seller, the butt of
comic papers in a score of languages? All that has not occurred to
you, eh?

"Well, think of it, and think, too, of what this machine may do for
us. Think of a Germany armed in a weaponless world, and, if empire
and mastery convey nothing to you, think of oh! American women
walking the streets in Berlin, comic English waiters in German
cafe's, slavish French laborers in German sweat-shops. And all this
boxed into a machine on a tripod by a monomaniac whose price we can
pay!"

He paused and walked towards the window. "Dictate the telegram to the
Staff, Von Wetten," he said, over his shoulder.

Von Wetten laid his hat and cane on a chair and crossed the room. "I
feel as if I were stabbing a fellow-officer in the back," he said,
drearily. Then, to Herr Haase: "Take this, you!"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," said Herr Haase, and picked up his pen.

There were twelve long telegram