t up, and having fired it off I'd
have sat there defenceless while he annihilated me.

But I don't know what they all mean by this constant talk of envious
nations crouching ready to spring at them. They talk and talk about
it, and their papers write and write about it, till they inflame each
other into a fever of pugnaciousness. I've never been anywhere in the
least like it in my life. In England people talked of a thousand
things, and hardly ever of war. When we were in Italy, and that time
in Paris, we hardly heard it mentioned. Directly my train got into
Germany at Goch coming from Flushing, and Germans began to get in,
there in the very train this everlasting talk of war and the
enviousness of other nations began, and it has never left off since.
The Archduke's murder didn't start it; it was going on weeks before
that, when first I came. It has been going on, Kloster says, growing
in clamour, for years, ever since the present Kaiser succeeded to the
throne. Kloster says the nation thinks it feels all this, but it is
merely being stage-managed by the group of men at the top, headed by S.
M. So well stage-managed is it, so carefully taught by such slow
degrees, that it is absolutely convinced it has arrived at its opinions
and judgments by itself. I wonder if these people are mad. Is it
possible for a whole nation to go mad at once? It is they who seem to
have the enviousness, to be torn with desire to get what isn't theirs.

"The disastrous crime of Sarajevo," continued Pastor Wienicke, "cannot
in this connection pass unnoticed. To smite down a God's Anointed!"
He held up his hands. "Not yet, it is true, an actually Anointed, but
set aside by God for future use. It is typical of the world outside
our Fatherland. Lawlessness and its companion Sacrilege stalk at
large. Women emerge from the seclusion God has arranged for them, and
rear their heads in shameless competition with men. Our rulers, whom
God has given us so that they shall guide and lead us and in return be
reverently taken care of, are blasphemously bombed." He flung both his
arms heavenwards. "Arise, Germany!" he cried. "Arise and show
thyself! Arise in thy might, I say, and let our enemies be scattered!"

Then he wiped his forehead, looked round in recognition of the _sehr
guts_ and _ausserordentlich schon gesagts_ that were being flung about,
re-lit his cigar with the aid of the Herr Lehrer, who sprang
obsequiously forward with a