"How lazy we English are nowadays! How readily we grasp the comforting delusion that excuses us from exertion. For the last three weeks I have been deliberately believing that a little British army--they say it is scarcely a hundred thousand men--would somehow break this rush of millions. But it has been driven back, as any one not in love with easy dreams might have known it would be driven back--here and then here and then here. It has been fighting night and day. It has made the most splendid fight--and the most ineffectual fight.... You see the vast swing of the German flail through Belgium. And meanwhile we have been standing about talking of the use we would make of our victory....
"We have been asleep," he said. "This country has been asleep....
"At the back of our minds," he went on bitterly, "I suppose we thought the French would do the heavy work on land--while we stood by at sea. So far as we thought at all. We're so temperate-minded; we're so full of qualifications and discretions.... And so leisurely.... Well, France is down. We've got to fight for France now over the ruins of Paris. Because you and I, Manning, didn't grasp the scale of it, because we indulged in generalisations when we ought to have been drilling and working. Because we've been doing 'business as usual' and all the rest of that sort of thing, while Western civilisation has been in its death agony. If this is to be another '71, on a larger scale and against not merely France but all Europe, if Prussianism is to walk rough-shod over civilisation, if France is to be crushed and Belgium murdered, then life is not worth having. Compared with such an issue as that no other issue, no other interest matters. Yet what are we doing to decide it--you and I? How can it end in anything but a German triumph if you and I, by the million, stand by...."
He paused despairfully and stared at the map.
"What ought we to be doing?" asked Mr. Manning.
"Every man ought to be in training," said Mr. Britling. "Every one ought to be participating.... In some way.... At any rate we ought not to be taking our ease at Matching's Easy any more...."
"It interrupts everything," said Hugh suddenly. "These Prussians are the biggest nuisance the world has ever seen."