When William Came | Page 8

a live man again, and I want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of
what happened. You know how much I know, and how little; those
fragments of Russian newspapers were about all the information that I
had. I don't even know clearly how the whole thing started."
Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has
done some necessary talking, and now assumes the role of listener.
"It started," said the doctor, "with a wholly unimportant disagreement
about some frontier business in East Africa; there was a slight attack of
nerves in the stock markets, and then the whole thing seemed in a fair
way towards being settled. Then the negotiations over the affair began
to drag unduly, and there was a further flutter of nervousness in the
money world. And then one morning the papers reported a highly
menacing speech by one of the German Ministers, and the situation
began to look black indeed. 'He will be disavowed,' every one said over
here, but in less than twenty-four hours those who knew anything knew
that the crisis was on us--only their knowledge came too late. 'War
between two such civilised and enlightened nations is an impossibility,'
one of our leaders of public opinion had declared on the Saturday; by
the following Friday the war had indeed become an impossibility,
because we could no longer carry it on. It burst on us with calculated
suddenness, and we were just not enough, everywhere where the

pressure came. Our ships were good against their ships, our seamen
were better than their seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with
their ships plus their superiority in aircraft. Our trained men were good
against their trained men, but they could not be in several places at
once, and the enemy could. Our half-trained men and our untrained
men could not master the science of war at a moment's notice, and a
moment's notice was all they got. The enemy were a nation apprenticed
in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice: we had not deemed
apprenticeship worth our while. There was courage enough running
loose in the land, but it was like unharnessed electricity, it controlled no
forces, it struck no blows. There was no time for the heroism and the
devotion which a drawn-out struggle, however hopeless, can produce;
the war was over almost as soon as it had begun. After the reverses
which happened with lightning rapidity in the first three days of
warfare, the newspapers made no effort to pretend that the situation
could be retrieved; editors and public alike recognised that these were
blows over the heart, and that it was a matter of moments before we
were counted out. One might liken the whole affair to a snap checkmate
early in a game of chess; one side had thought out the moves, and
brought the requisite pieces into play, the other side was hampered and
helpless, with its resources unavailable, its strategy discounted in
advance. That, in a nutshell, is the history of the war."
Yeovil was silent for a moment or two, then he asked:
"And the sequel, the peace?"
"The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly
prepared for the consequences of their victory. No one had quite
realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation
with a closely packed population. The conquerors were in a position to
dictate what terms they pleased, and it was not wonderful that their
ideas of aggrandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication. There
was no European combination ready to say them nay, and certainly no
one Power was going to be rash enough to step in to contest the terms
of the treaty that they imposed on the conquered. Annexation had
probably never been a dream before the war; after the war it suddenly
became temptingly practical. Warum nicht? became the theme of
leader-writers in the German press; they pointed out that Britain,
defeated and humiliated, but with enormous powers of recuperation,

would be a dangerous and inevitable enemy for the Germany of
to-morrow, while Britain incorporated within the Hohenzollern Empire
would merely be a disaffected province, without a navy to make its
disaffection a serious menace, and with great tax-paying capabilities,
which would be available for relieving the burdens of the other
Imperial States. Wherefore, why not annex? The warum nicht? party
prevailed. Our King, as you know, retired with his Court to Delhi, as
Emperor in the East, with most of his overseas dominions still subject
to his sway. The British Isles came under the German Crown as a
Reichsland, a sort of Alsace-Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead
of the Rhine. We still retain our Parliament, but it