ly
preparing a military force capable of crushing all humanity. All the
other nations had driven him to it; they had all been the first in
aggression. The insolent French, long before the war, had been sending
clouds of aeroplanes over German cities, bombarding them.

Ferragut blinked with surprise. This was news to him. It must have
occurred while he was on the high seas. The verbose positiveness of the
doctor did not permit any doubt whatever.... Besides, that lady ought
to know better than those who lived on the ocean.

Then had arisen the English provocation.... Like a traitor of
melodrama, the British government had been preparing the war for a long
time, not wishing to show its hand until the last moment; and Germany,
lover of peace, had had to defend herself from this enemy, the worst
one of all.

"God will punish England!" affirmed the doctor, looking at Ulysses.

And he not wishing to defraud her of her expectations, gallantly nodded
his head.... For all he cared, God might punish England.

But in expressing himself in such a way, he felt himself agitated by a
new duality. The English had been good comrades; he remembered
agreeably his voyages as an official aboard the British boats. At the
same time, their increasing power, invisible to the men on shore,
monstrous for those who were living on the sea, had been producing in
him a certain irritation. He was accustomed to find them either as
dominators of all the seas, or else solidly installed on all the
strategic and commercial coasts.

The Doctor, as though guessing the necessity of arousing his hatred of
the great enemy, appealed to his historical memories: Gibraltar, stolen
by the English; the piracies of Drake; the galleons of America seized
with methodical regularity by the British fleets; the landings on the
coast of Spain that in other centuries had perturbed the life of the
peninsula. England at the beginning of her greatness in the reign of
Elizabeth, was the size of Belgium; if she had made herself one of the
great powers, it was at the cost of the Spaniards and then of Holland,
even dominating the entire world. And the doctor spoke in English and
with so much vehemence about England's evil deeds against Spain that
the impressionable sailor ended by saying spontaneously:

"May God punish her!"

But just here reappeared the Mediterranean navigator, the complicated
and contradictory Ulysses. He suddenly remembered the repairs on his
vessel tha