“I still don’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her.
“No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the same conclusion in less few words.
War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and restored to fighting form by officers of the French army.
“But . . . but why . . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with pathetic helplessness.
Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant waterways.
“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable exasperation.
And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for news.
“The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money. Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in another.” . . .
For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite formula that another European war would be beyond a joke.
“If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.”