or his death.... Some one must pay me.... I shall wait for six
months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn
my way about there. And I will murder some German. Not just a common
German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind. A sacrifice. It
ought, for instance, to be comparatively easy to kill some of the
children of the Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian princes. I shall
prefer German children. I shall sacrifice them to Teddy. It ought not to
be difficult to find people who can be made directly responsible, the
people who invented the poison gas, for instance, and kill them, or to
kill people who are dear to them. Or necessary to them.... Women can do
that so much more easily than men....

"That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this kind will ever be
brought to an end. By women insisting on killing the kind of people who
make them. Rooting them out. By a campaign of pursuit and assassination
that will go on for years and years after the war itself is over....
Murder is such a little gentle punishment for the crime of war.... It
would be hardly more than a reproach for what has happened. Falling like
snow. Death after death. Flake by flake. This prince. That statesman.
The count who writes so fiercely for war.... That is what I am going to
do. If Teddy is really dead.... We women were ready enough a year or so
ago to starve and die for the Vote, and that was quite a little thing in
comparison with this business.... Don't you see what I mean? It's so
plain and sensible, Cissie. Whenever a man sits and thinks whether he
will make a war or not, then he will think too of women, women with
daggers, bombs; of a vengeance that will never tire nor rest; of
consecrated patient women ready to start out upon a pilgrimage that will
only end with his death.... I wouldn't hurt these war makers. No. In
spite of the poison gas. In spite of trench feet and the men who have
been made blind and the wounded who have lain for days, dying slowly in
the wet. Women ought not to hurt. But I would kill. Like killing
dangerous vermin. It would go on year by year. Balkan kings, German
princes, chancellors, they would have schemed for so much--and come to
just a rattle in the throat.... And if presently other kings and
emperors began to prance about and review armies, they too would go....

"Until all the world understood that women would not stand war any more
forever....

"Of course I shall do somethin