"My men and I have already decided to enlist in France. We are all well-trained and very good shots."
He answered as if this was the most natural thing to do.
It is just daybreak, and we are going through the Strait of Messina. At our side, instead of the French cruiser, which has left us upon our entering Italian territorial waters, is now the imposing mass of an Italian warship, the _Vittor Pisani_, anchored in the bay.
On the Sicilian coast Messina smiles, surrounded by woods of oranges loaded with golden fruit. After the terrible catastrophe of four years ago, the former monumental town has assumed the quiet, modest, village-like look of a Japanese seaport.
How far removed we are from those moments when the brute forces of Nature made all nations on earth meet here to relieve the sorrow of the stricken country in the noblest of competitions, and gave the world the momentary illusion of a wide sense of brotherhood amongst all peoples.
Still, even now, by the side of the Union Jack which floats over the English relief-fund building, the tricolour of Germany waves to the morning breeze.
[1] Where I had the fortune to come across the man who had never heard of the war.
I am just back from my second war-time trip to Berlin. It is about ten weeks since I was last in the German capital, and during the interval a big change has come over the city.
Less cheering, less flag-waving, less enthusiasm; the Berliners still tell you that everything is going on all right, the papers are still very optimistic, the short official bulletins keep very dark any bad news and magnify what is good, but the atmosphere is different and one feels the change in almost everything.
I arrived in Berlin on the day the German Pacific Squadron was sunk by British ships. Since the sinking of the _Emden_ nobody in Germany dared hope for any better destiny for the other ships on the high seas. They realised that all they could expect was to cause as large a loss of life as possible on the English vessels before going to their fate.
The news of the affair off the Falkland Islands greatly impressed Berlin.
It had not been expected that the British naval authorities would act so quickly and at one blow demolish a force whose destructiveness had given the people to hope that a longer life was in store for it.