The man represents his type and is, says McGregor, a mere bully.  He has become a bully because he could succeed as nothing else.  Given peace, it is doubtful if he could get and keep the job of errand-boy in a second-rate butcher’s shop.  Lacking the intelligence or spirit to succeed normally, he has not the decency to live quietly in the cheaper suburbs of Berlin and let other people do it.  Flourish they must, Hindenburg and his lot, and so the world is at war to keep their end up.

Now, says McGregor, it is undoubtedly sinful to fight, but he can’t help half forgiving those whose desire to have a round is such that they must needs cause the bothers.  But do I suppose that Hindenburg ever wanted to fight, ever meant or ever means to do it?  Not he; and that is why the War goes on and on and on.  We’ve got to work through all the other Germans, says he, before we’ll get to their militarists, who are all alive and doing nicely, thank you, behind.  When we are getting near the throat of the first of them then the War will end.

McGregor cannot bring himself to detest all the Bosches.  After all, he says, they do stick it out, and their very stupidity makes some call on his generosity.  But Hindenburg, he is convinced, never stuck anything out, except snubs from his competitor, Wilhelm, in the course of his uprising career; he makes no call on anybody’s generosity, taking everything he wants, including (says McGregor) the best cigars.  Without ever having studied them closely, McGregor has the most precise ideas of HINDENBURG’S daily life and habits.  He is quite sure he smokes all day the most expensive cigars, without paying for them or removing the bands.  He rose, says McGregor, by artifice combined with ostentation.  While his good soldiers were studying their musketry, he was practising ferocious expressions before his glass.  If he ever did get mixed up in a real battle (which McGregor doubts) he was undoubtedly last in and first out.  However it may appear in print, his military career would not bear close scrutiny; for that reason McGregor does not propose to scrutinise it.  And as for his indomitable will, he sees nothing to admire in the man’s persistence, since, when he stops persisting, he’ll become ungummed and, at the best, forgotten.

So said McGregor, and when I besought him to come to the point, he said he’d dealt with it, and if I had any sympathy left for Hindenburg or his line I was no better than a slave-driving, sit-at-home-and-push-others-over-the-parapet Prussian militarist myself.  As for the map, it didn’t matter in the least where Hindenburg took his old line to, since wherever in Europe it endeavoured to conceal itself his own little line would scent it out and follow it.  And if the Hindenburg line was more than two hundred miles long and the Rrobert James McGrregor line less than two hundred yards, still it didn’t matter; for when a Scot takes a dislike to somebody, that somebody’s number is up.