Then I thought I'd better wait and know more before sweeping Servia out of my disgusted sight. There are probably lots of other things to know. Kloster will tell me. I find I have a profound distrust really of these people. I don't mean of particular people, like the Koseritzes and the Klosters and their friends, but of Germans in the mass. It is a sort of deep-down discomfort of spirit, the discomfort of disagreement in fundamentals.
"Then there'll be war?" I said to the Grafin, staring at her placid face, and not a bit pleased about being going to be an excellent little German.
"Oh, a punitive expedition only," she said.
"Bernd thought it would mean Russia and France and you as well," I said.
"Oh, Berndhe is in love," said the Grafin, smiling.
"I don't quite see" I began.
"Lovers always exaggerate," she said. "Russia and France will not interfere in so just a punishment."
"But is it just?" I asked.
She gazed at me critically at this. It was not, she evidently considered, a suitable remark for one whose business it was to turn into an excellent little German. "Dear child," she said, "you cannot suppose that our ally, the Kaiser's ally, would make demands that are not just?"
"Do you think Friday's papers are still anywhere about?" was my answer. "I'd like to read the Austrian note, and think it over for myself. I haven't yet."
The Grafin smiled at this, and rang the bell. "I expect Dorner"Dorner is the butler"has them," she said. "But do not worry your little head this hot weather too much."
"It won't melt," I said, resenting that my head should be regarded as so very small and also made of sugar,she said something like this the other day, and I resented that too.
"There are people whose business it is to think these high matters out for us," she said, "and in their hands we can safely leave them."
"As if they were God," I remarked.
She looked at me critically again. "Precisely," she said. "Loyal subjects, true Christians, are alike in their unquestioning trust and obedience to authority."
I came upstairs then, in case I shouldn't be able to keep from saying something truthful and rude.
What a misfortune it is that truth always is so rude. So that a person who, like myself, for reasons that I can't help thinking are on the whole base, is anxious to hang on to being what servants call a real lady, is accordingly
constantly forced into a regrettable want of candour. I wish Bernd weren't a Junker. It is a great blot on his perfection. I'd much rather he were a navvy, a stark, swearing navvy, and we could go in for stark, swearing candour, and I needn't be a lady any more. It's so middle-class being a lady. These German aristocrats are hopelessly middle-class.
I know when I get to Berlin, and only want to keep abreast of the real things that may be going to happen, which will take me all my time, for I haven't been used to big events, it will be very annoying to be caught and delayed at every turn by small nets of politenesses and phrases and considerations, by having to remember every blessed one of the manners they go in for so terribly here. I've never met so much manners as in Germany. The protestations you have to make! The elaborateness and length of every acceptance or refusal! And it's all so much fluff and wind, signifying nothing, nothing at all unless it's fear; fear, again, their everlasting haunting spectre; fear of the other person's being offended if he is stronger than you, higher up,because then he'll hurt you, punish you somehow; ten to one, if you're a man, he'll fight you.
I've read the Austrian Note. I don't wonder very much at Servia's refusing to accept it, and yet surely it would have been wiser if she had accepted it, anyhow as much of it as she possibly could.
"Much wiser," said the Grafin, smiling gently when I said this at dinner tonight. "At least, wiser for 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 dyingwhat a world to have to live in, when this is luckwill 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 killingon 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 lived here, is simply inconceivable. A defensive war in which she should have to defend her homes from wanton attack is inconceivable. There is no wantonness now in the civilized nations. We have outgrown the blood stage. We are sober peoples, sober and civilian,grown up, in fact. And the semi-civilized peoples would be afraid to attack a nation so strong as Germany. She is training and living, and has been training and living for years and years, simply to attack. What is the use of their protesting? One has only to listen to their points of view to brush aside the perfunctory protestations they put in every now and then, as if by order, whenever they remember not to be natural. Oh, I know this is very different from what I was writing and feeling two or three days ago, but I've been let down with a jerk, I'm being reminded of the impressions I got in Berlin,