"Good G.o.d!" I rejoined, stupefied.

"It's a good thing," said von G. quietly.

For many days and nights I wondered what the Junker meant. I think I know now. He meant that the War Party (of which he was a very potent and zealous member) had at length found a pretext for forcing upon Europe the struggle for which the German War Lords regarded themselves vastly more ready than any possible combination of foes. The first year of the war has amply demonstrated the accuracy of their calculations.

Germany's triumphs in the opening twelvemonth of Armageddon were the triumphs of the superlatively prepared. If Serajevo had not come along when it did--with the German military establishment just built up to a peace-footing of nearly one million officers and men and re-armed at a cost of two hundred and fifty million dollars; with von Tirpitz's Fleet at the acme of its efficiency; with the Kiel Ca.n.a.l reconstructed for the pa.s.sage of super-dreadnought ironclads--Germany's readiness for war might have been fatally inferior to that of her enemies-to-be. The Fatherland was ready, armed to the teeth, as nation never was before.

The psychological moment had dawned.

This was the rea.s.suring state of affairs at home. What did the War Party see when it put its mailed hand to the vizor and looked abroad, across to England, west over the Rhine to France, and toward Russia? It saw Great Britain on what truly enough looked to most of the world like the brink of revolution in Ireland. It saw a France, of which a great Senator had only a few days before said that her forts were defective, her guns short of ammunition and her army lacking in even such rudimentary war sinews as sufficient boots for the troops. It saw a Russia stirred by industrial strife which seemed to need only the threat of grave foreign complications to inflame her always rebellious proletariat into revolt. Serajevo had all the earmarks of providential timeliness.

"It's a good thing," said the sententious von G.

The "trippers" from Hamburg and nearer-by points in Schleswig-Holstein, whom the Sunday of Kiel Week attracts by the thousand, were far more stunned than von G. by the news from Bosnia, which put so tragic an end to their seaside holiday. The esplanade, which had been throbbing with bustle and glittering with color, did not know at first why all the ships in the harbor, British as well as German, had suddenly lowered their pennants to half-mast, or why the Austrian royal standard had suddenly broken out, also at the mourning alt.i.tude. The Kaiser was racing in the Baltic. "Old Franz Josef," some said, "has died. He's been going for many a day." Presently the truth percolated through the awestruck crowds. The sleek white naval dispatch-boat _Sleipner_ tore through the Bay, Baltic-bound. She carries news to William II when he governs Germany from the quarter-deck of the _Hohenzollern_. _Sleipner_ dodged eel-like, through the lines of British and German men-of-war, ocean liners, pleasure-craft and racing-yachts anch.o.r.ed here, there and everywhere. In fifteen minutes she was alongside the Emperor's fleet schooner, _Meteor V_, which had broken off her race on receipt of wireless tidings of the Archducal couple's murderous fate. The _Hohenzollern_ had already "wirelessed" for the fastest torpedo-boat in port to fetch the Kaiser and his staff off the _Meteor_, and the destroyer and _Sleipner_ snorted up, foam-bespattered, almost simultaneously. The Emperor clambered into the torpedo-boat and started for the harbor.

It was the face of a William II, blanched ashen-gray, which turned from the bridge of the destroyer to acknowledge, in solemn gravity, the salutes of the officers and crew of the British flagship, as the Kaiser's craft raced past the _King George V_. Always stern of mien, the Emperor now looked severity personified. His staff stood apart. He seemed to wish to be alone, absolutely, with the overwhelming thoughts of the moment. Three minutes later, and he stepped aboard the _Hohenzollern_. Now another pennant showed at the mainmast of the Imperial yacht--the blue and yellow signal flag which means: "His Majesty is aboard, but preoccupied." I wonder if posterity will ever know what monumental reflections flitted through the Kaiser's mind in that first hour after Serajevo? Did he, like von G., think it was "a good thing," too? I suppose the first stars and stripes to be half-masted anywhere in the world that dread sundown were those which drooped from the stern of _Utowana_, Mr. Allison Vincent Armour's steam-yacht, anch.o.r.ed in the Bay off Kiel Naval Academy. A puffing little launch took me out to the _Utowana_ as soon as I had gathered some coherent facts, which I wanted to present to Mr. Armour and his guests, American Amba.s.sador and Mrs. James W. Gerard, of Berlin, who had motored to Kiel the day before. Mrs. Gerard's sister, Countess Sigray, is the wife of a Hungarian n.o.bleman, and the Amba.s.sador's wife, if my memory serves me correctly, once told me of her sister's acquaintance with both of the a.s.sa.s.sinated Royalties. We Americans discussed the immediate consequences of the day's event--how the Kaiser would take it, how it would affect poor old Emperor Francis Joseph. William II and Admiral von Tirpitz had been the Archduke's guests at Konopischt in Bohemia only a few weeks before. The Kaiser and the future ruler of Austria-Hungary had become great friends. They were not always that.

There had been a good deal of the William II in Franz Ferdinand himself.

People often said it was a case of Greek meet Greek, and that two such insistent personalities were inevitably bound to clash. Others said that the Archduke, inspired by his brilliantly clever consort, always insisted that German overlordship in Vienna would cease when he came to the throne. Still others knew that despite antipathies and antagonisms, the two men had at length come to be genuinely fond of each other, and that their ideas and ideals for the greater glory of Germanic Europe coincided.

These things we chatted and canva.s.sed, irresponsibly, on _Utowana's_ immaculate deck. All of us were persuaded of the imminency of a crisis in Austrian-Serbian relations in consequence of Princip's crime. But I am quite sure not a soul of us held himself capable of imagining that, because of that remote felony, Great Britain and Germany would be at war five weeks later. Beyond us spread the peaceful panorama of British and German war-craft, anch.o.r.ed side by side, and the thought would have perished at birth.

Returned to the terrace of the Seebade-Anstalt, one found the atmosphere heavily charged with suppressed excitement. Immaculately-groomed young diplomats, down from Berlin for the Sunday, were twirling their walking-sticks and yellow gloves which were not, after all, to accompany them to Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia's garden-party. That, like everything else connected with Kiel Week, had suddenly been called off.

A party of Americans flocked together at the entrance to the hotel to exchange low-spoken views on the all-pervading topic. There was big Lieutenant-Commander Walter R. Gherardi, our wide-awake Berlin Naval Attache, resplendent in gala gold-braided uniform, and Mrs. Gherardi, who had motored me around the environs of Kiel that morning; Albert Billings Ruddock, Third Secretary of the Emba.s.sy, and his pretty and clever wife; and Lanier Winslow, Amba.s.sador Gerard's private secretary, his effervescent good nature repressed for the first time I ever remembered observing it in that unbecoming and unnatural condition.

Secretary Ruddock's father, Mr. Charles H. Ruddock, of New York, completed the group.

I met Mr. Ruddock, Sr., six months later in New York. "Do you remember what you told me that afternoon at Kiel, when we were discussing Serajevo?" he asked. I pleaded a lapse of recollection. "You said," he reminded me, "'this means war.'"

The aspect of Kiel became in the twinkling of an eye as funereal as Serajevo and Vienna themselves must have been in that blood-bespattered hour. Bands stopped playing, flags not lowered to half-mast were hauled down altogether, and beer-gardens emptied. "Hohenzollern weather,"

Teuton synonym for invincible sunshine, vanished in keeping with the drooping spirits of everybody and everything, and bleak thunder-showers intermingled with flashes of heat-lightning to complete the _mise en scene_. A week of gaiety unsurpa.s.sed evaporated into gloom and foreboding.

For myself it had been a week crowded with great recollections. Special correspondents telegraphing to influential foreign newspapers, particularly if they were English and American newspapers, were always _persona gratissima_ with German dignitaries, even of the blood royal.

The group of us on duty at what, alas! was to be the last Kiel Week, at least of the old sort, for many a year, were the recipients, as usual, of that scientific hospitality which foreign newspapermen always receive at German official hands. Before we were at Kiel twenty-four hours we were deluged with invitations to garden-parties at the Commanding Admiral's, to _soirees_ innumerable ash.o.r.e and afloat, to luncheons at the Town Hall, to the grand b.a.l.l.s at the Naval Academy, and to functions of lesser magnitude for the bluejackets. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz had left his card at my lodgings and so had Admiral von Rebeur-Paschwitz, the Chief of Staff of the Baltic Station, who will be pleasantly remembered by friends of Washington days when he was German Naval Attache there. Captain Lohlein, the courteous chief of the Press Bureau of the Navy Department at Berlin, had equipped me with credentials which practically made me a freeman of Kiel harbor for the time being. In no single direction was effort lacking, on the part of the authorities who have the most practical conception of any Government in the world of the value of advertising, to enable special correspondents at Kiel to practise their profession comfortably and successfully. I must not forget to mention the visit paid me by Baron von Stumm, chief of the Anglo-American division of the German Foreign Office; for Stumm's opinion of me underwent a kaleidoscopic and mysterious change a few weeks later. Treasured conspicuously in my memories of Kiel, too, will long remain the call I received from Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach's private secretary, and the message he brought me from the Master of Essen. It seems less cryptic to me now than then. I sought an interview from the Cannon Queen's consort about the visit he and his staff of experts had just paid to the great a.r.s.enals and dockyards of Great Britain.

"Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach presents his compliments," said the secretary, "and asks me to say how much he regrets he can not grant an interview, as the matters which took him to England are not such as he cares to discuss in public."

I wonder how many American newspaper readers, in the hurly-burly of the fast-marching events which preceded and ushered in the war, ever knew of the little army of eminent and expert "investigators" who honored England with their company on the very threshold of hostilities? June saw the presence in London, ostensibly for "the season," of Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, accompanied not only by his plutocratic wife, but by his chief technical expert, Doctor Ehrensberger of Essen, an old-time friend of American steel men like Mr. Schwab and ex-Amba.s.sador Leishman, and by Herr von Bulow, a kinsman of the ex-Imperial Chancellor, who was the Krupp general representative in England. With a _navete_ which Britons themselves now regard almost incomprehensible, the Krupp party was shown over practically all of England's greatest weapons-of-war works at Birkenhead, Barrow-in-Furness, Glasgow, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Sheffield. They saw the world-famed plants of Firth, Cammell-Laird, Vickers-Maxim, Brown, Armstrong-Whitworth and Hadfield. Not with the eyes of Cook tourists, but with the practised gaze of specialists, they were privileged to look upon sights which must have sent them away with a vivid, up-to-date and accurate impression of Britain's capabilities in the all-vital realm of production of war materials for both army and navy. It was from this personally conducted junket through the zone of British war industry that Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach returned--not to Essen, but to Kiel (where he has his summer home) and to the Kaiser and von Tirpitz. It was to them his report was made. I think I understand better now why he could not see his way to letting me tell the British public what he saw and learned in England. I was guileless when I sought the interview. Let this be my apology to Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach for attempting to penetrate into matters obviously not fit "to discuss in public."

During July England entertained three other important German emissaries, each a specialist, as befitted the country of his origin and the object of his mission. Doctor Dernburg came over. He spent ten strenuous days "in touch" with financial and economic circles and subjects. No man could be relied upon to bring back to Berlin a shrewder estimate of the British commercial situation. A few days later Herr Ballin, the German shipping king, crossed the channel. I recall telegraphing a Berlin newspaper notice which explained that the astute managing director of the Hamburg-American line went to England to "look into the question of fuel-oil supplies." Herr Ballin, like Doctor Dernburg, also kept "in touch" with the British circles most important and interesting to himself and the Fatherland. He must have dabbled in high politics a bit, too, for only the other day Lord Haldane revealed that he arranged for Herr Ballin to "meet a few friends" at his lordship's hospitable home at Queen Anne's Gate. Germans always felt a proprietary right to seek the hospitality of the Scotch statesman who acknowledged that his spiritual domicile was in the Fatherland.

Then, finally, came another German, far more august than Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Dernburg and Ballin--Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia. His visit fell within a week of Germany's declaration of war against France and Russia. The Prince, who enjoyed many warm friendships in England and visited the country at frequent intervals, also spent a busy week in London. He saw the King, called on with Prince Louis of Battenberg, the then First Sea Lord, and paid his respects to Mr. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.

Englishmen only conjecture how he put in the rest of his time.

Perhaps an episode in the trial of Karl Lody, the German naval spy who was executed at the Tower of London on November 6, has its place in the unrecorded history of Prince Henry of Prussia's epochal visit to the British Isles. Lody confessed to his military judges at Middles.e.x Guildhall that he received his orders to report on British naval preparations from "a distinguished personage."

"Give us his name," commanded Lord Cheylesmore, presiding officer of the court.

"I would rather not tell it in open court," pleaded the prisoner, whom Scotland Yard, the day before, had asked me to look at, with a view to possible identification with certain Berlin affiliations.

"I will write his name on a piece of paper for the court's confidential information," Lody added. His request was granted.

When we were officially notified that the Kaiser would proceed next morning by special train to Berlin, we made our own preparations to depart. The British squadron had still a day and a half of its scheduled visit to complete, and Vice-Admiral Warrender told us he would remain accordingly. The German Admiralty had extended him the hospitality of the new War Ca.n.a.l for the cruise of his fleet into the North Sea, but he decided to send only the light cruisers by that route and take his battleships home, as they had come, by the roundabout route of the Baltic.

On Monday noon, June 29, I went back to Berlin, to live through five weeks of finishing touches for the grand world blood-bath.

CHAPTER IV

THE STAGE MANAGERS

Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is _not_. It is not a party in the sense of President Wilson's organization or Colonel Roosevelt's Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for the War Party's address or telephone number. No German would ever acknowledge that he belonged to Europe's largest Black Hand league. You could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister, its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to approach.

When the German War Party pressed the b.u.t.ton for the Great Ma.s.sacre, the Fatherland had, roundly, sixty-seven million five hundred thousand inhabitants within its thriving walls. At a liberal estimate, no one can ever convince me that more than one million five hundred thousand Germans really wanted war. _They_ were the "War Party." Sixty-six millions of the Kaiser's subjects, immersed in the most abundant prosperity any European country of modern times had been vouchsafed, longed only for the continuance of the conditions which had brought about this state of unparalleled national weal. I do not believe that William II, deep down in his heart, craved for war. I can vouch for the literal accuracy of a hitherto unrecorded piece of ante-bellum history which bears out my doubts of the Kaiser's immediate responsibility for the war, though it does not acquit him of supine acquiescence in, and to that extent abetting, the War Party's plot.

On the afternoon of Sat.u.r.day, August 1, 1914, the wife of Lieutenant-General Helmuth von Moltke, then Chief of the Great German General Staff, paid a visit to a certain home in Berlin, which shall be nameless. The _Frau Generalstabschef_ was in a state of obvious mental excitement.

"_Ach_, what a day I've been through, _Kinder_!" she began. "My husband came home just before I left. Dog-tired, he threw himself on to the couch, a total wreck, explaining to me that he had finally accomplished the three days' hardest work he had ever done in his whole life--he had helped to induce the Kaiser to sign the mobilization order!"

There is the evidence, disclosed in the homeliest, yet the most direct, fashion, of the German War Party's unescapable culpability for the supreme crime against humanity. The "sword" had, indeed, been "forced"

into the Kaiser's hand. This is no brief for the Kaiser's innocence.

No man did more than William II himself, during twenty-six years of explosive reign, to stimulate the military clique in the belief that when the dread hour came the Supreme War Lord would be "with my Army."

Yet German officers, in those occasional moments when conviviality bred loquacity, were fond of averring, as more than one of them has averred to me, that "the Kaiser lacked the moral courage to sign a mobilization order." _Die Post_, a leading War Party organ, said as much during the Morocco imbroglio in 1911. Perhaps that is why General von Moltke had to force the pen, which for the nonce was mightier than the sword, into the reluctant hand of William II.

The Kaiser was const.i.tutionally addicted to swaggering war talk, but, in my judgment, he preferred the bark to the bite. He likes his job. Like our Roosevelt, he has a "perfectly corking time" wielding the scepter.

Raised in the belief that the Hohenzollerns were divinely appointed to their Royal estate, William II dearly loves his trade. He does not want to lose his throne. In peace there was little danger of its ever slipping from under him, thanks to a Socialist "movement" which was noisy but never really menacing. In war Hohenzollern rule is in perpetual peril. Hostile armies, if they ever battered their way to Potsdam, would almost surely wreck the dynasty, even if the mob had not already saved them that trouble. The Kaiser, sagacious like every man when his livelihood is at stake, always had these dread eventualities in mind. His personal interests, the fortunes of his House, all lay along the path of manifest safety--peace. Meantime his concessions to the War Party were generous and frequent. He rattled the saber on its demand.

He donned his "shining armor" at Austria's side when the Germanic Powers coerced Russia into recognition of the Bosnian annexation in 1909. He sent the _Panther_ to Agadir harbor in 1911 because the War Party howled for "deeds" in Morocco. It hoped that history in Northwestern Africa would repeat itself--that the Triple Entente would yield to German bluff as it yielded in Southeastern Europe two years previous. It did not, and it was then that the German War Party swore a solemn vow of "Never Again!" The days of the Kaiser who merely threatened war were numbered.

Next time the sword would be "forced" into his hand. "Before G.o.d and history my conscience is clear. _I did not will this war_. One year has elapsed since I was _obliged_ to call the German people to arms."

Thus William of Hohenzollern's manifesto to his people from Main Headquarters on the first anniversary of the war, August 1, 1915.

Herewith I place _Frau Generalstabschef_ von Moltke on the stand as chief witness in the Kaiser's defense.

I have said that sixty-six million Germans wanted peace and one million five hundred thousand demanded war. But in Germany _minority_ rules.

It rules supreme when the issue is war or peace, and when the German War Party _insisted_ upon deeds instead of speeches the nation, Kaiser and all, Reichstag and Socialist, Prince and peasant, had but one alternative--to yield. In July, 1914, the War Party imperiously asked for war, and war ensued. That is the ineffaceable long and short of Armageddon. I am persuaded that William II on July 31 was confronted with something strangely like an abrupt alternative of mobilization or abdication.

a.s.sertions of the German people's consecration to peace may strike the reader as incongruous in face of the magnificent unanimity with which the entire Fatherland has waged and is still waging the war. But such a view leaves wholly out of account the most prodigious and amazing of all the German War Party's preparations--the skilful manipulation of public opinion for "the Day." In ten brief days--those fateful hours between July 23, when Austria launched her brutal ultimatum at Serbia, and August 1, when mobilization of the German Army and Navy made a European conflagration a certainty--Germany's vast peace majority, by deception which I shall outline in a subsequent chapter, was converted into a mult.i.tudinous mob mad for war.

I count the merely material preparations of the War Party--the steady expansion of Krupps, the development of the Fleet, the invention of the forty-two centimeter gun, the vast secret storage of arms and ammunition, the 1913 increase of the Army, the acc.u.mulation of a war-chest of gold, the stealthy organization of every conceivable instrument and resource of war down to details too minute for the ordinary mind to grasp; all these, I count as nothing compared to the hypnotization of the German national mind extending over many years.

In England and America the name of Bernhardi was on everybody's lips as the archpriest of the war. I doubt if one man in ten thousand in Germany ever heard of Bernhardi before August, 1914. He became an international personality mainly through the graces of foreign newspaper correspondents in Berlin, who, recognizing his book, _Germany's Next War_, as cla.s.sic proclamation of the War Party's designs on the world, dignified it with commensurate attention, not because of its authorship, but because of its innate _authoritativeness_. The result was the translation of _Germany's Next War_ into the English language, and subsequently, I suppose, into every other civilized language in the world. Perhaps I am myself to some extent responsible for Bernhardi's vogue in the United States. He was going to cross our country en route back to Europe from the Far East, and wrote to ask me to suggest to him the name of an American translator and publisher for his books.

Bernhardi, a mere retired general of cavalry with a gift for incisive writing, woke up to find himself famous. But nothing could be more beyond the mark than to imagine that he was the pioneer of German war-aggression. He was merely its most plain-spoken prophet. The way had been blazed for decades before he appeared upon the scene. After Bernhardi had been successfully launched on the bookshelves of the world, the German War Party took him up, and it was not long before _Die Post_, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_ and other organs of blood-and-iron were able to make "the highly gratifying" announcement that Bernhardi's manual had been compressed into a fifty-pfennig popular edition, so that the German ma.s.ses might be educated in the inspiring doctrine of manifest Teuton destiny, as Bernhardi so unblushingly set it forth.

The German War Party's certificate of incorporation is dated Versailles, January 18, 1871, when, on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck and Moltke crowned victorious William I of Prussia German Emperor. Cradled in Prussianism, the German War Party has always been Prussian, rather than German. To the credit of Bavaria, Saxony, Baden and Wurttemberg be that forever remembered. Denmark and Austria, during the seven years preceding Versailles, had had their lessons. Now France lay prostrate, despoiled of her fairest provinces and financially bled white, as the conqueror imagined. From that moment the Prussian head began swelling with invincible self-esteem, to emerge in the succeeding generation in an insensate and megalomaniac conviction that to the race which had accomplished what the Germans had achieved nothing was impossible.

"World Power"--Rule or Ruin--became the national slogan.

In the reconstruction years following the 1870-71 campaign non-military Germany was bent on laying the foundations of Teuton industrial greatness. The project was vouchsafed no support from the military hotspurs who, within ten years of Sedan and Paris, did their utmost to force Bismarck into giving humbled France a fresh drubbing, that her power to rise from the dust might be crushed for all time. Then the Prussian War Party demanded that the scalp of Russia be added to its insatiable belt. Bismarck propitiated the Bernhardis of that day by thundering in the Reichstag that "We Germans fear G.o.d, and nothing else in this world!" When the Chancellor of Iron burnt that piece of bombast into the German soul in 1887, a year before William the Speechmaker was enthroned, he wrote the German War Party's "platform." Since then it has had many planks added to it, but all of them have rested squarely and firmly on the concrete upon which they were imbedded, viz., that _Furor Teutonicus_ was a power which, when it went forth to slay and conquer, was invincible because it was filled with naught but the fear of G.o.d. _Nouveau riche_ Germany, with France's one billion two hundred and fifty million dollars of gold indemnity in its pocket, ceased to be the Fatherland of homely virtues, celebrated in song and story, and became the plethoric Fatherland, drunk with power and wealth won by arms, the Fatherland which was to adopt the gospel of political brutality as a new national _Leit-motif_. "We, not the Jews, are G.o.d's chosen people. Our military prowess and our intellectual superiority make German _Weltmacht_ manifest destiny. Full steam ahead!" Thus it was, a generation ago, that the German War Party was launched on its mad career.

During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi.

Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large degree the war l.u.s.t of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German ma.s.ses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon.

These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the culminating effects of their devilry.