"Italy is already as good as conquered," Rudi proclaimed, "and England simply needs to be tilted off her worm-eaten perch by a sudden shock."
Kirtley rubbed his eyes. What a widespread, horrible butchery was being nursed and nourished here in this obscure family of peace? Surely this good folk did not appreciate the meaning of it all. Was it not merely something awfully exciting to talk about, argue about, puzzle over, in the prosaic humdrum at this respectable hearthstone?
Such a strange form of social entertainment! The "arsenal" below always came to Gard's mind. These people acted as if they were actually thinking of capturing the whole Eastern Hemisphere, speaking as if they were going to rule it like conquerors, going to enforce at the point of the blade German "might," "will," "rights." These were the common expressions used. Kirtley thought the household must be unbalanced on this topic.
He said to himself, "No one else whom I have read or heard of is contemplating such a campaign. Other races are holding forth on the benefits and glories of peace. These Dresden Germans are talking of the benefits and glories of war!"
This example in these simple, every-day Buchers was most pointed. Their lines were furthest from the military. Teaching diction and phonetics to women and male singers, studying engineering, religion and the gentle arts, had nothing to do with such proposed bloody belligerence.
Only Rudi could be called somewhat martial. Hydraulics was his branch, and his frequent absences on missions about which he assumed an important and mystifying air, such as is, for that matter, usual in bumptious young men, never caused any comment or visible interest on the part of the others. He gave himself out to be close to the militaire, familiar with its secrets, as he freely blew his cigarette smoke across the meal table; and to him the family deferred on these subjects. Surely all this was to Gard very foreign and interesting.
"What a different race of beings! What a curious revelation to observe, what a doughty complex to comprehend!"
He was more confounded by the attitude of the women. They were even fiercer than the men. To them the other Europeans were a wholly bad lot. Those neighbors were so much in the way of the good, all-worthy Germans. But it was on the English that this feminine hatred vented itself most turbulently. Frau Bucher shouted that she would be more than glad—she would be hilarious—if war came.
"I would wear my last rag for years, see my two boys dead on the battle front, if Gross Britain could be knocked into the bottom of the sea."
Was all this a part of that national gladness Gard was observing in Germany and could not gage, could not yet give an explicit and sufficient reason for? Those old-time Teuton liberals, masters of prose and verse—how would they feel at home in this modern Rhineland of hysterical spleen and arms provocative? Was it possible he had really come on a sort of fool's errand?