or Servia. But it is well so." And
she smiled again.

I've come to the conclusion that the Grafin too wants war,---a big
European war, so that Germany, who is so longing to get that tiresome
rattling sword of hers out of the scabbard, can seize the excuse and
rush in. One only has to have stayed here, lived among them and heard
them talk, to _know_ that they're all on tiptoe for an excuse to start
their attacking. They've been working for years for the moment when
they can safely attack. It has been the Kaiser's one idea, Kloster
says, during the whole of his reign. Of course it's true it has been a
peaceful reign,--they're always pointing that out here when
endeavouring to convince a foreigner that the last thing their immense
preparations mean is war; of course a reign is peaceful up to the
moment when it isn't. They've edged away carefully up to now from any
possible quarrel, because they weren't ready for the almighty smash
they mean to have when they are ready. They've prepared to the
smallest detail. Bernd told me that the men who can't fight, the old
and unfit, each have received instructions for years and years past
every autumn, secret exact instructions, as to what they are to do,
when war is declared, to help in the successful killing of their
brothers,--their brothers, little mother, for whom, too, Christ died.
Each of these aged or more or less diseased Germans, the left-overs who
really can't possibly fight, has his place allotted to him in these
secret orders in the nearest town to where he lives, a place
supervising the stores or doing organizing work. Every other man,
except those who have the luck to be idiots or dying--what a world to
have to live in, when this is luck--will fight. The women, and the
thousands of imported Russians and Poles, will look after the farms for
the short time the men will be away, for it is to be a short war, a few
weeks only, as short as the triumphant war of 1870. Did you ever know
anything so horrifying, so evil, as this minute concentration, year in
year out, for decades, on killing--on successful, triumphant killing,
just so that you can grab something that doesn't belong to you. It is
no use dressing it up in big windy words like _Deutschthum_ and the
rest of the stuff the authorities find it convenient to fool their
slaves with,--it comes to exactly that. I always, you see, think of
Germany as the grabber, the attacker. Anything else, now that I've
live