man to be the right man in the right place,
y'understand, he should ought to have the gumption and business ability
which a feller naturally picks up in the course of being an earl or a
duke, understand me, the best we could hope for would be a fleet of six
rebuilt tugboats by the fall of nineteen fifty."

"It wasn't England's fault that she made such a mistake, Abe," Morris
said. "Up to the time Germany started this war it used to was considered
that if nations did got to go to war, y'understand, the best way to go
about it was to put it in charge of a good sport like a tennis champion
would naturally have to be, and as for the earls and the dukes, the
theory on which them fellers fooled away their time was that they was
just resting up between wars, Abe, because they was, anyhow, gentlemen,
and it was England's idea that all a soldier had to be was a gentleman.
But nowadays that's already a thing of the past. The way Germany fixed
things with her long-distance cannons, her liquid fire, gas, and
Zeppelins, a soldier don't have to be so much of a gentleman as an
inventor, a chemist, an engineer, and a general all-around hustler."

"In fact, Mawruss," Abe said, "a German soldier don't need to be a
gentleman at all, because when it comes to stealing chateau furniture,
destroying cathedrals, burning houses, and chopping down fruit-trees,
any experience as a gentleman wouldn't be much of a help to a German
soldier."

"That's what I am telling you, Abe," Morris declared. "Germany has made
war a business, y'understand, and she figures that a gentleman in the
war business is like a gentleman in the pants business. He ain't going
to make any more or better pants by being a gentleman, y'understand, and
if we are going to win this war, Abe, we should ought to stop beefing
about German soldiers not being gentlemen, and take into consideration
the fact that while German engineers, chemists, inventors, and
submarine-builders may not know whether you play lawn tennis with a cue,
mallet, or a full deck of fifty-two cards including the joker, Abe, you
can bet your life that they know an awful lot about engineering,
chemistry, and building submarines, and they don't need no so-called
experts to help them, neither."

"And you can also bet your life, Mawruss, that no German would have
turned down Colonel Lewis's machine-guns," Abe said, "the way them
experts of ours did."

"Well, what is an expert to do, Abe?" Morris asked. "If he g