s the matter with me?' . . . Nothing--or, in other
words, Everything--that is to say, this War."

"It's terrible, of course; but I don't see--" She broke off.
"Is it the War itself that upsets you, or the little we can do to
help? If _that's_ your trouble, why, of course it was silly of me to
worry you just now about my being nervous of facing these people.
But we're only at the beginning--"

"Agatha!" The Vicar drew a hand from his pocket, laid it on his
wife's shoulder, and looked her in the eyes. "Don't I know that, if
the call came, you would face a platoon? It's I who am weak.
This War--" He stared out of the window again.

"It is a just War, if ever there was one. . . . Robert, you don't
doubt _that_, surely! Forced on us--Why, you yourself used to warn
me, when I little heeded, that the Germans were preparing it, that
'the Day' must come sooner or later: for they would have it so."

"That's true enough."

"So positive about it as you were then, proving to me that their
Naval Estimates could spell nothing else! . . . And now that it has
come, what is the matter with _us?_ Have _we_ provoked it? Have
_we_ torn up treaties? Had you, a week ago--had any one we know-the
smallest desire for it?"

"Before God, we had not. The English people--I will swear to it, in
this corner of the land--had no more quarrel with the Germans than I
have with you at this moment. Why, we saw how the first draft--the
Naval Reservists--went off last Sunday. In a kind of stupor, they
were. But wars are made by Governments, Agatha; never by peoples."

"And our Government--much as I detest them for their behaviour to the
Welsh Church--our Government worked for peace up to the last."

"I honestly believe they did. I am sure they did . . . up to the
last, as you say. The question is, _Were they glad or sorry when
they didn't bring it off?_"

"Robert!"

"I am trying--as we shall all have to try--to look at things as they
are. This trouble has been brewing ever since the South African War,
. . . and for ten years at least Germany has been shaping up for a
quarrel which we have hoped to decline. On a hundred points of
preparation they are ready and we are not; they have probably sown
this idle nation with their spies as they sowed France before 1870:
they make no more bones about a broken oath or two to-day than they
made about forging the Ems telegram. They are an unpleasant race,--
the North Germans, at least--and a