Poles, will look after the farms for the short time the men will be away, for it is to be a short war, a few weeks only, as short as the triumphant war of 1870.  Did you ever know anything so horrifying, so evil, as this minute concentration, year in year out, for decades, on killing—­on successful, triumphant killing, just so that you can grab something that doesn’t belong to you.  It is no use dressing it up in big windy words like Deutschthum and the rest of the stuff the authorities find it convenient to fool their slaves with,—­it comes to exactly that.  I always, you see, think of Germany as the grabber, the attacker.  Anything else, now that I’ve lived here, is simply inconceivable.  A defensive war in which she should have to defend her homes from wanton attack is inconceivable.  There is no wantonness now in the civilized nations.  We have outgrown the blood stage.  We are sober peoples, sober and civilian,—­grown up, in fact.  And the semi-civilized peoples would be afraid to attack a nation so strong as Germany.  She is training and living, and has been training and living for years and years, simply to attack.  What is the use of their protesting?  One has only to listen to their points of view to brush aside the perfunctory protestations they put in every now and then, as if by order, whenever they remember not to be natural.  Oh, I know this is very different from what I was writing and feeling two or three days ago, but I’ve been let down with a jerk, I’m being reminded of the impressions I got in Berlin, they’ve come up sharply again, and I’m not so confident that what was the matter with the people there was only heat and overwork.  There was an eagerness about them, a kind of fever to begin their grabbing.  I told you, I think, how Berlin made me think when first I got there of something seething.

Darling mother, forgive me if I’m shrill.  I wouldn’t be shrill, I’m certain I wouldn’t, if I could believe in the necessity, the justice of such a war, if Germany weren’t going to war but war were coming to Germany.  And I’m afraid,—­afraid because of Bernd.  Suppose he—­Well, perhaps by the time we get to Berlin things will have calmed down, and the Grafin will be able to come back straight here, which God grant, and I shall go back to Frau Berg and my flies.  I shall regard those flies now with the utmost friendliness.  I shan’t mind anything they do.

Good night blessed mother.  I’m so thankful these two days are over.

  Your Chris.

It is this silence here, this absurd peaceful sunshine, and the placid Grafin, and the bland unconsciousness of nature that I find hard to bear.

  Berlin, Wednesday, July 29th.

My own little mother,

It is six o’clock in the morning, and I’m in my dressing-gown writing to you, because if I don’t do it now I shall be swamped with people and things, as I was all yesterday and the day before, and not get a moment’s quiet.  You see, there is going to be war, almost to a dead certainty, and the Germans have gone mad.  The effect even on this house is feverish, so that getting up very early will be my only chance of writing to you.