hanged after Jena...."

"Willie Nixon," said one of the visitors, "who came back from Hamburg
yesterday, says they are convinced they will have taken Paris and St.
Petersburg and one or two other little places and practically settled
everything for us by about Christmas."

"And London?"

"I forgot if he said London. But I suppose a London more or less hardly
matters. They don't think we shall dare come in, but if we do they will
Zeppelin the fleet and walk through our army--if you can call it an
army."

Manning nodded confirmation.

"They do not understand," said Mr. Britling.

"Sir George Padish told me the same sort of thing," said Lady Homartyn.
"He was in Berlin in June."

"Of course the efficiency of their preparations is almost incredible,"
said another of Lady Meade's party.

"They have thought out and got ready for everything--literally
everything."

Section 13

Mr. Britling had been a little surprised by the speech he had made. He
hadn't realised before he began to talk how angry and scornful he was at
this final coming into action of the Teutonic militarism that had so
long menaced his world. He had always said it would never really
fight--and here it was fighting! He was furious with the indignation of
an apologist betrayed. He had only realised the strength and passion of
his own belligerent opinions as he had heard them, and as he walked back
with his wife through the village to the Dower House, he was still in
the swirl of this self-discovery; he was darkly silent, devising
fiercely denunciatory phrases against Krupp and Kaiser. "Krupp and
Kaiser," he grasped that obvious, convenient alliteration. "It is all
that is bad in mediaevalism allied to all that is bad in modernity," he
told himself.

"The world," he said, startling Mrs. Britling with his sudden speech,
"will be intolerable to live in, it will be unendurable for a decent
human being, unless we win this war.

"We must smash or be smashed...."

His brain was so busy with such stuff that for a time he stared at Mrs.
Harrowdean's belated telegram without grasping the meaning of a word of
it. He realised slowly that it was incumbent upon him to go over to her,
but he postponed his departure very readily in order to play hockey.
Besides which it would be a full moon, and he felt that summer moonlight
was far better than sunset and dinner time for the declarations he was
expected to make. And then he went on phrase-making again about