“Lucien de Grammont wants to go on to Berlin,” I said.
Bertrand clasped his hands over the crook of his stick and nodded scornfully at a headstrong world that refused to take his advice. His expression and attitude reminded me of Dr. Johnson, in the celebrated picture, awaiting an audience with Lord Chesterfield.
“He forgets, perhaps, that we at least went into this war to uphold the neutrality of Belgium. We stayed in to make the Germans pay for the damage they’d done there. Later . . . Later, we were told that the French must have Alsace-Lorraine, Russia must have Constantinople, Italy must have an infernal place called the Trentino. And any stray islands or continents where a German or the ally of a German has ever set foot must be taken away and given to somebody else. It may be all very right and proper; but that wasn’t our aim in 1914.”
More was coming; but his audience began to shew signs of hostility; and Violet intervened by setting her boy on the old man’s knee and whispering:
“You mustn’t quarrel on a day like this. Help me to shew him the different nationalities, Uncle Bertrand. Sandy! Sandy! You see the little man down there by the tree. D’you know what he is? He’s a Jap. Japanese.”
“Jap-an-ese,” Sandy repeated slowly.
“Those are Americans,” she continued, with her finger pointing to three grave, lean-faced young officers. “Amer-i-cans.”
“Call ’em ‘Yanks’, most noble marquess,” grunted Bertrand, who—with much else that was Johnsonian—exhibited the doctor’s unreasoning antipathy to the new world.
“Merry-cans,” Sandy repeated.
“There’s a Frenchman! There’s a Canadian! See, Sandy? Uncle Bertrand, find me an Italian,” Violet pleaded. “I don’t know how much this mite will remember, but it is rather marvellous to see them all together. That’s a South African, isn’t it? Oh, and a poor soul with only one leg. There’ll still be plenty of them for him to see when he’s grown up. I wish I could find an Italian!”