I know when I get to Berlin, and only want to keep abreast of the real things that may be going to happen, which will take me all my time, for I haven’t been used to big events, it will be very annoying to be caught and delayed at every turn by small nets of politenesses and phrases and considerations, by having to remember every blessed one of the manners they go in for so terribly here.  I’ve never met so much manners as in Germany.  The protestations you have to make!  The elaborateness and length of every acceptance or refusal!  And it’s all so much fluff and wind, signifying nothing, nothing at all unless it’s fear; fear, again, their everlasting haunting spectre; fear of the other person’s being offended if he is stronger than you, higher up,—­because then he’ll hurt you, punish you somehow; ten to one, if you’re a man, he’ll fight you.

I’ve read the Austrian Note.  I don’t wonder very much at Servia’s refusing to accept it, and yet surely it would have been wiser if she had accepted it, anyhow as much of it as she possibly could.

“Much wiser,” said the Grafin, smiling gently when I said this at dinner tonight.  “At least, wiser for Servia.  But it is well so.”  And she smiled again.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Grafin too wants war,—–­a big European war, so that Germany, who is so longing to get that tiresome rattling sword of hers out of the scabbard, can seize the excuse and rush in.  One only has to have stayed here, lived among them and heard them talk, to know that they’re all on tiptoe for an excuse to start their attacking.  They’ve been working for years for the moment when they can safely attack.  It has been the Kaiser’s one idea, Kloster says, during the whole of his reign.  Of course it’s true it has been a peaceful reign,—­they’re always pointing that out here when endeavouring to convince a foreigner that the last thing their immense preparations mean is war; of course a reign is peaceful up to the moment when it isn’t.  They’ve edged away carefully up to now from any possible quarrel, because they weren’t ready for the almighty smash they mean to have when they are ready.  They’ve prepared to the smallest detail.  Bernd told me that the men who can’t fight, the old and unfit, each have received instructions for years and years past every autumn, secret exact instructions, as to what they are to do, when war is declared, to help in the successful killing of their brothers,—­their brothers, little mother, for whom, too, Christ died.  Each of these aged or more or less diseased Germans, the left-overs who really can’t possibly fight, has his place allotted to him in these secret orders in the nearest town to where he lives, a place supervising the stores or doing organizing work.  Every other man, except those who have the luck to be idiots or dying—­what a world to have to live in, when this is luck—­will fight.  The women, and the thousands of imported Russians and