“I had much intercourse and correspondence with Frenchmen before the war,” said a German professor of European history, “and I found a willingness among those of my own generation, those between thirty and fifty, to drop the matter, to admit that, after all, Alsace-Lorraine was as much German as French. Then some ten years ago I began to note a change of tone. The younger generation was being pumped full of the _revanche_ spirit from the day they started to school; in foreign countries every French text-book incited crocodile tears over the poor statue of Strassburg, with its withered flowers. It was this younger generation that brought France into the war—this and Clemenceau, who is still living back in 1870.”
“But the despatches, the official state papers already published, show that England was doing her best to avoid....”
“Oh, you simple Americans! You do not seem to realize that such things are made for foreign consumption, made to sell, to flash before a gaping world, to publish in the school-books of the future, not for actual use, not to be seriously believed by the experienced and the disillusioned. That has been the story of European politics for centuries, since long before you dear, naïve people came into existence. You are like a new-comer dropping into a poker game that has been going on since long before you learned to distinguish one card from another. You do not guess that the deck is pin-pricked and that every kind of underhand trick is tacitly allowed, so long as the player can ‘get away with it.’ Now if we could get the _really_ secret papers that passed back and forth, especially if we could get what went on in private conversation or ’way inside the heads of Grey and the rest of them....”
“Yes, but—you will pardon my naïveté, I am sure—but if England had long deliberately planned a European war, why did she have nothing but a contemp—but a very small army ready when it broke out?”
“Because she expected, as usual, to have some one else do her fighting for her. And she succeeded! When they were almost burned beyond recovery she got America to pull her chestnuts out of the fire—and now America does not even get enough out of it to salve her scorched fingers. But for America we should have won the war, unquestionably. But England has lost it, in a way, too, for she has been forced to let America assume the most important place in the world. You will have a war with England yourselves for that very reason in a few years, as soon as she catches her breath and discovers you at the head of the table, in the seat which she has so long arrogated to herself. You will be her next victim—with Japan jumping on your back the moment it is turned.