“Glad of that,” said the fisherman; “I don’t like travelling with Germans.”
“Unfortunately,” said Yeovil, “we have to travel with them, as partners in the same State concern, and not by any means the predominant partner either.”
“Oh, that will soon right itself,” said the other with loud assertiveness, “that will right itself damn soon.”
“Nothing in politics rights itself,” said Yeovil; “things have to be righted, which is a different matter.”
“What d’y’mean?” said the fisherman, who did not like to have his assertions taken up and shaken into shape.
“We have given a clever and domineering people a chance to plant themselves down as masters in our land; I don’t imagine that they are going to give us an easy chance to push them out. To do that we shall have to be a little cleverer than they are, a little harder, a little fiercer, and a good deal more self-sacrificing than we have been in my lifetime or in yours.”
“We’ll be that, right enough,” said the fisherman; “we mean business this time. The last war wasn’t a war, it was a snap. We weren’t prepared and they were. That won’t happen again, bless you. I know what I’m talking about. I go up and down the country, and I hear what people are saying.”
Yeovil privately doubted if he ever heard anything but his own opinions.
“It stands to reason,” continued the fisherman, “that a highly civilised race like ours, with the record that we’ve had for leading the whole world, is not going to be held under for long by a lot of damned sausage-eating Germans. Don’t you believe it! I know what I’m talking about. I’ve travelled about the world a bit.”
Yeovil shrewdly suspected that the world travels amounted to nothing more than a trip to the United States and perhaps the Channel Islands, with, possibly, a week or fortnight in Paris.