, discussing in an impersonal
detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the fatigue of the
long railway journey to Finland.

"Since then, Holham, I have been encouraged to keep my mind as much off
the war and public affairs as possible, and I have been glad to do so. I
knew the worst and there was no particular use in deepening my
despondency by dragging out the details. But now I am more or less a
live man again, and I want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of what
happened. You know how much I know, and how little; those fragments of
Russian newspapers were about all the information that I had. I don't
even know clearly how the whole thing started."

Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has
done some necessary talking, and now assumes the role of listener.

"It started," said the doctor, "with a wholly unimportant disagreement
about some frontier business in East Africa; there was a slight attack of
nerves in the stock markets, and then the whole thing seemed in a fair
way towards being settled. Then the negotiations over the affair began
to drag unduly, and there was a further flutter of nervousness in the
money world. And then one morning the papers reported a highly menacing
speech by one of the German Ministers, and the situation began to look
black indeed. 'He will be disavowed,' every one said over here, but in
less than twenty-four hours those who knew anything knew that the crisis
was on us--only their knowledge came too late. 'War between two such
civilised and enlightened nations is an impossibility,' one of our
leaders of public opinion had declared on the Saturday; by the following
Friday the war had indeed become an impossibility, because we could no
longer carry it on. It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we
were just not enough, everywhere where the pressure came. Our ships were
good against their ships, our seamen were better than their seamen, but
our ships were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority
in aircraft. Our trained men were good against their trained men, but
they could not be in several places at once, and the enemy could. Our
half-trained men and our untrained men could not master the science of
war at a moment's notice, and a moment's notice was all they got. The
enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle
apprentice: we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while. There was
cou