“But is Great Britain, with her splendid navy, really a broken reed?” queried the financier very seriously.
“Personally, I do not at all agree. I only tell you the declaration of our General Staff.”
“Britain has a very mysterious way of asserting her own superiority,” said the banker, shaking his head dubiously. “France is still, as she has ever been, a nation of great emotions. But Great Britain, with her enormous Colonial possessions, her deep-seated loyalty, and her huge wealth, is a tremendous power—a power which I believe the Kaiser has never yet estimated at its true value.”
“Bah! my dear Arnaud. We, in Berlin, know all that is in progress. Surely you must know, you must feel, the irresistible power of our militarism—of our great and formidable war-machine. Germany is the greatest nation at war that the world has ever seen, and—”
“And England still rules the seas,” interrupted the financier in a hard voice.
“The seas! Bah!” declared his dusty, travel-worn visitor. “We shall first win on land; then our grand fleet will face those overbearing British. We shall, like the Dutch, place a broom upon the mast-head of the flag-ship of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, and sweep the British clean off the seas.”
“You are optimistical—to say the least.”
“I am, my dear Arnaud,” he admitted, “because I, as one of the General Staff, know what has been arranged, and what is intended. I know the great surprises we have in store for Europe—those great guns, which will smash and pulverise to dust the strongest fortresses which man can devise, and aircraft which will hurl down five tons of high explosive at a time,” he added, with an exultant laugh. “But, I had almost forgotten. Have you had any report from our friend Van Meenen, in Ostend?”
“It came yesterday, and is included in the papers you have there. Our friends in Liège have been warned, I suppose?”
“They have been warned to-day. Doctor Wilberz, brave Belgian, of course, has a secret wireless in his house, while sixty of our trusty agents are living there, quite unsuspected.”