“Yes, Sir,” I said. “I was in the commando of that Smuts who has now been bought by England.”
“What were your countrymen’s losses?” he asked eagerly.
I did not know, but I hazarded a guess. “In the field some twenty thousand. But many more by sickness and in the accursed prison-camps of the English.”
Again a spasm of pain crossed his face.
“Twenty thousand,” he repeated huskily. “A mere handful. Today we lose as many in a skirmish in the Polish marshes.”
Then he broke out fiercely.
“I did not seek the war ... It was forced on me ... I laboured for peace ... The blood of millions is on the heads of England and Russia, but England most of all. God will yet avenge it. He that takes the sword will perish by the sword. Mine was forced from the scabbard in self-defence, and I am guiltless. Do they know that among your people?”
“All the world knows it, sire,” I said.
He gave his hand to Stumm and turned away. The last I saw of him was a figure moving like a sleep-walker, with no spring in his step, amid his tall suite. I felt that I was looking on at a far bigger tragedy than any I had seen in action. Here was one that had loosed Hell, and the furies of Hell had got hold of him. He was no common man, for in his presence I felt an attraction which was not merely the mastery of one used to command. That would not have impressed me, for I had never owned a master. But here was a human being who, unlike Stumm and his kind, had the power of laying himself alongside other men. That was the irony of it. Stumm would not have cared a tinker’s curse for all the massacres in history. But this man, the chief of a nation of Stumms, paid the price in war for the gifts that had made him successful in peace. He had imagination and nerves, and the one was white hot and the others were quivering. I would not have been in his shoes for the throne of the Universe ...
All afternoon we sped southward, mostly in a country of hills and wooded valleys. Stumm, for him, was very pleasant. His imperial master must have been gracious to him, and he passed a bit of it on to me. But he was anxious to see that I had got the right impression.