_For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose of July
had flamed into splendid bloom. I drew breath, for my task
approached its ending, and looked up from the yellowed newspaper
records of a great War waged forty-four years ago._
_Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the
web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes....
Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a
man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail._
_For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across
the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant
thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea. One opal dawn showed the
grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and
war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green
line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a
school of submarines. Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately
whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights.
Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code. Gulls
cradled on the glassy waters of the Channel must have been roused by
outbursts of full-throated British cheering, and the crash of the
Fleet bands striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders
of the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship commanding
the Southern Fleet. No sound reached us ashore but the hush of the
waves, the whisper of the night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of
the mousing owls on Muttersmoor. Yet what we saw that night was the
awakening of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is not
past and gone._
_Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed solidity.
The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the soil of a neutral
country, demolishing the matchless heirlooms of Art and the priceless
treasures of Literature, bringing down in gray fragments the glories
of Gothic architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and
shattering the House of Life. The galleries and cabinets of noble
and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are plundered._
_We have lived to see the War of Nations. We are in it: fighting as
our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are fighting; for racial
name, national existence, social independence, and freedom of bodies
and souls. And this being so, I see no cause to blot a line that I
have written. For the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914.
The New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead days I
have tried to vivify._
_The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly,
but not in defiance of the Rules that govern the Great Game.
Treaties were held as something more sacred than scraps of paper.
Blood was lavishly poured out, gold relentlessly wrung from the
coffers of a vanquished and impoverished State. Things were done--as
in the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the world
shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing. Kings and
nobles made War like noblemen and Kings._
_Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up stone by
stone the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted
and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and
terrors of the soul. "_But for me,_" he is reported to have said,
"_three great wars would not have been made, nor would eight hundred
thousand of my fellow men have died by violence. Now, for all that I
have to answer before Almighty God!_" ... Could the relentless
exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the
imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under
the hands of his successors--might he have known what Dead Sea fruit
of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of
Germany, was fated to bring forth--he would have drunk ere death of
the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he would have seen in the
shape of his pupil the grotesque, distorted image of himself._