“If I really were what this Government believes me to be, it would not seem strange to you.”
She sat thinking, worrying her under lip with delicate white teeth; then:
“Garry, do you believe that your country is going to be drawn into this war?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said bitterly. “The Lusitania ought to have meant war between us and Germany. Every brutal Teutonic disregard of decency since then ought to have meant war—every unarmed ship sunk by their U-boats, every outrage in America perpetrated by their spies and agents ought to have meant war. I don’t know how much more this Administration will force us to endure—what further flagrant insult Germany means to offer. They’ve answered the President’s last note by canning Von Tirpitz and promising, conditionally, to sink no more unarmed ships without warning. But they all are liars, the Huns. So that’s the way matters stand, Thessa, and I haven’t the slightest idea of what is going to happen to my humiliated country.”
“Why does not your country prepare?” she asked.
“God knows why. Washington doesn’t believe in it, I suppose.”
“You should build ships,” she said. “You should prepare plans for calling out your young men.”
He nodded indifferently:
“There was a preparedness parade. I marched in it. But it only irritated Washington. Now, finally, the latest Mexican insult is penetrating official stupidity, and we are mobilising our State Guardsmen for service on the border. And that’s about all we are doing. We are making neither guns nor rifles; we are building no ships; the increase in our regular army is of little account; some of the most vital of the great 177 national departments are presided over by rogues, clowns, and fools—pacifists all!—stupid, dull, grotesque and impotent. And you ask me what my country is going to do. And I tell you that I don’t know. For real Americans, Thessa, these last two years have been years of shame. For we should have armed and mobilised when the first rifle-shot cracked across the Belgian frontier at Longwy; and we should have declared war when the first Hun set his filthy hoof on Belgian soil.