My father shrugged his shoulders. “You enthusiast!” said he pityingly.
“Not at all,” said Frederick in my defence. “The wish expressed by Martha has no taint of enthusiasm, for its fulfilment is assured to us by science. Better and more united and more happy are men constantly becoming, from the beginning of all things to the present day, but so imperceptibly, so slowly that a little span of time, like a year, may not show any visible progress.”
“If you believe so firmly in everlasting progress,” remarked my father, “why are you so often complaining about reaction—about relapse into barbarism?”
“Because”—Frederick took out a pencil and drew a spiral on a sheet of paper—“because the march of civilisation is something like this. Does not this line, in spite of its occasional twist backwards, always move steadily onwards? The year which is commencing may, it is true, represent a twist, especially if, as seems likely, another war is going to be waged. Anything of that sort pushes culture a long way back in every aspect, material as well as moral.”
“You are not talking much like a soldier, my dear Tilling.”
“I am talking, my dear father-in-law, of a general proposition. My view about this may be true or false; whether it is soldierly or not is another question. At any rate truth can only be in any matter one way. If a thing is red, should one man call it blue on principle, because he wears a blue uniform; and black, if he wears a black cowl?”
“A what?” My father was in the habit, if any discussion did not go quite as he liked, to affect a little difficulty of hearing. To reply to such a “what” by repeating the whole sentence was what few people had the patience to do, and the best way was to give up the argument.
Afterwards, the same night, when we had got home, I put my husband under examination.
“What was that you said to my father? That there was every appearance that there would be another fight this year? I will not have you go into another war; I will not have it.”
“What is the use, dear Martha, of this passionate ‘I will not’? You would certainly be the first to withdraw it in face of the facts. By how much more visibly war stands at the gate, by so much the more impossible would it be for me to apply for my discharge. Immediately after Schleswig-Holstein it might have been feasible.”