1
“On the turf,” expounded my uncle Bertrand, “races are won by the intelligence of the individual backer. It is only when you lose that you divide the responsibility between the breeder, the trainer, the jockey and the horse. That is why the sporting tipster is the happiest of men. Why shouldn’t we call ourselves ‘the Brigadier’ and run a sporting column in Peace? You and I, George, get neither pleasure nor profit from seeing our political forecasts being fulfilled.” . . .
“Perhaps, if we’d backed our fancy . . .” I began.
“I’ve backed Peace,” said my uncle grimly, “to a tune that would make an unsuccessful racing-stable seem like a safe investment. I pay tens of thousands a year for the privilege of casting myself for the part of Cassandra. We can’t be so much cleverer than other people . . .”
“If we were,” I interrupted, “we might make them believe what we tell them.”
“The world believes what it wants to believe,” said Bertrand.
“And is quite unabashed when it’s proved wrong,” I added, as I pocketed the article which I had brought to Princes Gardens for my uncle’s imprimatur.
Many months had slipped away since we discussed the day of reckoning that awaited an opportunist government and an indifferent country. In the last four months of 1921 and the first eight of 1922 every storm that we had foretold blew against our doors or broke through our roofs. By the time that the peace coalition fell, the great powers were at loggerheads, war was at a day’s remove and the mutter of social revolution was heard in England for the first time since the Chartist riots. No one heeded our jeremiads; and there is little satisfaction now in recalling our prescience. Indeed, before presuming to lecture the public, I might well ask myself what hearing I won from my friends and what attention I paid to my own warnings. Did O’Rane listen when I told him that his stubbornness had already alienated his wife and would, as likely as not, encourage the unemployed to break his windows? Did I listen when I told myself that, though I had sworn to have no scene with Barbara, the armed neutrality could not last?
Did I really believe that the conditions created by the Versailles conference could only be changed by another war?