forgetting my mother, bless her!--they are merely devices for getting
rid of the hours, and so not having to think. You hate thought as
a nation, and we live for it. Music is thought; all art is thought;
commercial prosperity is thought; soldiering is thought."

"And we are a nation of idiots?" asked Michael.

"No; I didn't say that. I should say you are a nation of sensualists.
You value sensation above everything; you pursue the enjoyable. You are
a nation of children who are always having a perpetual holiday. You go
straying all over the world for fun, and annex it generally, so that
you can have tiger-shooting in India, and lots of gold to pay for your
tiger-shooting in Africa, and fur from Canada for your coats. But
it's all a game; not one man in a thousand in England has any idea of
Empire."

"Oh, I think you are wrong there," said Michael. "You believe that only
because we don't talk about it. It's--it's like what we agreed about
Parsifal. We don't talk about it because it is so much part of us."

Falbe sat up.

"I deny it; I deny it flatly," he said. "I know where I get my power of
foolish, unthinking enjoyment from, and it's from my English blood. I
rejoice in my English blood, because you are the happiest people on the
face of the earth. But you are happy because you don't think, whereas
the joy of being German is that you do think. England is lying in the
shade, like us, with a cigarette and a drink--I wish I had one--and a
golf ball or the world with which she has been playing her game. But
Germany is sitting up all night thinking, and every morning she gives an
order or two."

Michael supplied the cigarette.

"Do you mean she is thinking about England's golf ball?" asked Michael.

"Why, of course she is! What else is there to think about?"

"Oh, it's impossible that there should be a European war," said Michael,
"for that is what it will mean!"

"And why is a European war impossible?" demanded Falbe, lighting his
cigarette.

"It's simply unthinkable!"

"Because you don't think," he interrupted. "I can tell you that the
thought of war is never absent for a single day from the average German
mind. We are all soldiers, you see. We start with that. You start by
being golfers and cricketers. But 'der Tag' is never quite absent
from the German mind. I don't say that all you golfers and cricketers
wouldn't make good soldiers, but you've got to be made. You can't be a
golfer one day and a soldier th