The Commander of that Army Corps came up to salute. The cars
went away with the Generals and the Minister for War; the Army
passed out of sight over the ridges to the north; the peasant
women stooped again to their work in the fields, and wet mist
shut down on all the plain; but one tingled with the
electricity that had passed. Now one knows what the
solidarity of civilization means. Later on the civilized
nations will know more, and will wonder and laugh together at
their old blindness. When Lord Kitchener went down the line,
before the march past, they say that he stopped to speak to a
General who had been Marchand's Chief of Staff at the time of
Fashoda. And Fashoda was one of several cases when
civilization was very nearly maneuvered into fighting with
itself "for the King of Prussia," as the saying goes. The
all-embracing vileness of the Boche is best realized from
French soil, where they have had large experience of it. "And
yet," as some one observed, "we ought to have known that a
race who have brought anonymous letter-writing to its highest
pitch in their own dirty Court affairs would certainly use the
same methods in their foreign politics. _Why_ didn't we
realize?"
"For the same reason," another responded, "that society did
not realize that the late Mr. Smith, of your England, who
married three wives, bought baths in advance for each of them,
and, when they had left him all their money, drowned them one
by one."
"And were the baths by any chance called Denmark, Austria, and
France in 1870?" a third asked.
"No, they were respectable British tubs. But until Mr. Smith
had drowned his third wife people didn't get suspicious. They
argued that 'men don't do such things.' That sentiment is the
criminal's best protection."