! what a bore it will be.... And Maxse and
all those scaremongers cock-a-hoop and 'I told you so.' Damn these
Germans!"

He looked despondent and worried. He followed Mr. Britling towards the
dining-room with his hands deep in his pockets.

"It's going to be a tremendous thing," he said, after he had greeted
Mrs. Britling and Hugh and Aunt Wilshire and Teddy, and seated himself
at Mr. Britling's hospitable board. "It's going to upset everything. We
don't begin to imagine all the mischief it is going to do."

Mr. Britling was full of the heady draught of liberal optimism he had
been brewing upstairs. "I am not sorry I have lived to see this war," he
said. "It may be a tremendous catastrophe in one sense, but in another
it is a huge step forward in human life. It is the end of forty years of
evil suspense. It is crisis and solution."

"I wish I could see it like that," said Mr. Carmine.

"It is like a thaw--everything has been in a frozen confusion since that
Jew-German Treaty of Berlin. And since 1871."

"Why not since Schleswig-Holstein?" said Mr. Carmine.

"Why not? Or since the Treaty of Vienna?"

"Or since--One might go back."

"To the Roman Empire," said Hugh.

"To the first conquest of all," said Teddy....

"I couldn't work this morning," said Hugh. "I have been reading in the
Encyclopaedia about races and religions in the Balkans.... It's very
mixed."

"So long as it could only be dealt with piecemeal," said Mr. Britling.
"And that is just where the tremendous opportunity of this war comes in.
Now everything becomes fluid. We can redraw the map of the world. A week
ago we were all quarrelling bitterly about things too little for human
impatience. Now suddenly we face an epoch. This is an epoch. The world
is plastic for men to do what they will with it. This is the end and the
beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French
Revolution or the Reformation.... And we live in it...."

He paused impressively.

"I wonder what will happen to Albania?" said Hugh, but his comment was
disregarded.

"War makes men bitter and narrow," said Mr. Carmine.

"War narrowly conceived," said Mr. Britling. "But this is an indignant
and generous war."

They speculated about the possible intervention of the United States.
Mr. Britling thought that the attack on Belgium demanded the
intervention of every civilised power, that all the best instincts of
America would be for intervention. "The more,"