Stacey, who thought his sister was being badly scolded for no reason at all, gave her a sly friendly smile, at which her face brightened. She recovered so quickly, indeed, and her husband had shown, throughout, such absence of any discomfort, that Stacey concluded Julie must be inured to this sort of harshness. He tried to remember whether his father had always been so sharp with her, but couldn’t.
“Jimmy would have had his chance, no doubt,” Mr. Carroll remarked, “if the war had lasted a few months longer, as it should have.” He frowned. “I believe,” he went on solemnly, “that the Armistice will prove to be the biggest disaster the world has ever known.” And he looked about him fiercely.
The first time that Stacey had heard this sentiment expressed (at tea, in Rome, at the house of an elderly American gentleman whom every one cultivated because he mysteriously always had butter and sugar), he had first felt genuine horror, and then immediately had flown into a white ungovernable rage during which he said things that had reduced the kindly old gentleman, who was used to having every one pleasant, to a state of helpless trembling discomfort. However, by now Stacey was growing used to the sentiment (it had been mentioned, for instance, on the boat, and the smoking-room of the Pullman car had rung with it). It no longer produced in him any emotion save a weary scorn.
“I’d like to have seen the Huns get a taste of their own medicine,” Mr. Carroll continued, his eyes gleaming beneath their heavy white eyebrows. “Only a month or two more of the war and they’d have seen their soil invaded, their towns in flames, and the Allies would have marched into Berlin. Now hear them talk! They don’t know they’re beaten!”
“I dare say they suspected it when they handed over their fleet,” said Stacey calmly.
“You don’t agree with me, son?” Mr. Carroll exclaimed.
Stacey shook his head. “It would have cost thousands of lives more,” he remarked, helping himself to almonds.
“Not so many! Not so many!” his father insisted.
“Some,” said Stacey. “However,” he added in a dry voice, “to do our leaders justice, I don’t think they gave that point undue importance. The truth was we’d have had to pause pretty soon, anyway. Our troops were fagged, our lines of communication were impossibly long, and we’d shot off most of our ammunition. A pause would have given the Germans a chance to fall back on a nice short line all prepared for them, and it would have taken another tremendous battle to break through again,—and there was winter already upon us.”
Mr. Carroll had followed his son’s words attentively. “Well, of course,” he said, “that’s different. I’m not a military man and I don’t pretend to have become an expert strategist, like most of my friends at the club. They’ll amuse you, Stacey. All the same, it’s an outrage that the Germans should get off scot-free.”