I nodded.
“Suppose,” said Ascher, “that this warning had come to you then, while you were still a soldier. Suppose that you had known what your brother officers did not know, or the men under you, that war was coming, you would have resigned your commission. Is it so?”
“No,” I said, “I shouldn’t.”
“It would have been, from my point of view—for I am a coward—it would have been the natural thing to do.”
“It wouldn’t have been natural to me,” I said. “I couldn’t have done it. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t. I’m not professing to be particularly brave or chivalrous or anything of that sort. But to resign under those circumstances——! Well, one doesn’t do it.”
“Nor do I know why,” said Ascher, “but I cannot do it either. It is, you see, the same thing. I must, of course, go on; just as you would have felt yourself obliged to go on. The warning makes no difference.”
The idea that a banker feels about his business as a soldier does about his profession was new to me. But I understood more or less what Ascher meant. If he had that kind of sense of obligation there was clearly no more to be said about the point.
“And England?” I said. “Is she to be in it?”
“Who knows? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I hope not. The disaster will be far less terrible if England is able to remain at peace.”
“Tell me this,” I said, “or if I am impertinent, say so, and I shall not ask again. What was Captain von Richter doing in Ireland?”