rring_ to kill itself! No other nation has
this blot on it.

"Yes," he said, nodding in agreement with the expression on my face,
"yes, we are mad. It is in this reign that we've gone mad, mad with
the obsession to get at all costs and by any means to the top of the
world. We must outstrip; outstrip at whatever cost of happiness and
life. We must be better trained, more efficient, quicker at grabbing
than other nations, and it is the children who must do it for us. Our
future rests on their brains. And if they fail, if they can't stand
the strain, we break them. They're of no future use. Let them go.
Who cares if they kill themselves? So many fewer inefficients, that's
all. The State considers that they are better dead."

And all the while, while he was telling me these things, on the shore
lay Kloster and his wife, neatly spread out side by side beneath a tree
asleep with their handkerchiefs over their faces. That's the idea
we've got in England of Germany,--multitudes of comfortable couples,
kindly and sleepy, snoozing away the afternoon hours in gardens or pine
forests. That's the idea the Government wants to keep before Europe,
Herr von Inster says, this idea of benevolent, beery harmlessness. It
doesn't want other nations to know about the children, the dead, flung
aside children, the ruthless breaking up of any material that will not
help in the driving of their great machine of destruction, because then
the other nations would know, he says, before Germany is ready for it
to be known, that she will stick at nothing.

Wanda has just taken away my lamp, Good night my own sweet mother.

Your Chris.

_Berlin, Wednesday, July 8th, 1914_.

Beloved mother,

Kloster says I'm to go into the country this very week and not come
back for a whole fortnight. This is just a line to tell you this, and
that he has written to a forester's family he knows living in the
depths of the forests up beyond Stettin. They take in summer-boarders,
and have had pupils of his before, and he is arranging with them for me
to go there this very next Saturday.

Do you mind, darling mother? I mean, my doing something so suddenly
without asking you first? But I'm like the tail being wagged by the
dog, obliged to wag whether it wants to or not. I'm very unhappy at
being shovelled off like this, away from my lessons for two solid
weeks, but it's no use my protesting. One can't protest with Kloster.
He says he wo