As he said this, he gave me a faint, rather humorous smile, which I interpreted as a warning or request not to try explaining my antecedents.
"Ach! That is better!" grunted the General. And I knew that, whatever might be his attitude toward women in general, Englishwomen were anyhow beyond the pale.
(Later I heard from the Countess that women were not much higher than the "four-footed animal kingdom" for Bernhardi; that he loudly contradicted his wife, even at hotel tables, when they traveled together; that he always walked ahead of her in the street, and pushed past her or even other ladies, if strangers to him, in order to go first through a doorway.)
The General condescended to glance at me, and I thought again that he was the most ruthless, brutal-looking man I had ever met, the very type of militarism in flesh and blood—especially blood.
"You are a friend of the English?" he inquired.
I dared to stand up for England by answering that I thought her the greatest country in the world.
"That is nonsense," was his comment. I shall never forget it, or the cutting way in which it was spoken.
The Prince, though knowing me to be English (which Bernhardi, to do him justice, did not), backed the General up, explaining for my benefit as well as the children's that England might once have been nominally the most powerful nation, owing to her talent for grabbing possessions all over the world, and the cleverness of her diplomacy. But, he said, that was different now, under the Liberal Government. England was going down exactly as Rome had gone down, and the knell of her greatness was sounding already. Not one of her colonies would stand by her when her day of trouble should come, and most of them would go against her.
"You have only to read their own newspapers," said General Bernhardi, "to see that the English know they are degenerating fast. But the hand of Fate is on them. They are asleep, and they will wake up with a rude shock only when it is too late."