The thunder of the guns in the Balkan War, while revealing to pacifists the grim realities of the battlefield, did not awake them from their dreams. On the contrary, the pacifists persisted all the more in their illusions. After all, they urged, this war was not a European conflict, but an episode in the eternal Eastern question. Throughout the crisis, the Great Powers, by the conferences of their ambassadors and the utterances of their statesmen, had shown their earnest desire for peace. The Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, those two good-natured giants, both showed the same conciliatory disposition. The balance of power between these two groups compelled them, even had they wished otherwise, to maintain a pacific attitude, while the Balkan conflagration, being thus localized, was dying out at their feet. After so searching a test, the prospect for the future seemed bright indeed. Life in the clouds of pacifism was not conducive to the realization of the ever-growing danger. It was enough to live in Berlin, amid such circles as were in touch with the Imperial Government and the foreign embassies. The heart of the German capital was indeed the meeting-place for the principal wires of world-politics. During the last few years, the air that one breathed there was strangely oppressive; the ground quaked beneath one’s feet, as in the neighbourhood of a volcanic eruption. One never ceased gazing anxiously at the horizon, now towards the Vosges, now towards the Balkans, wherever the storm-clouds, charged with electricity, were gathering at the moment. A gust of fresh wind would scatter these clouds, but they would gather again after the briefest interval. As one felt only too clearly, the peace was so fragile that the slightest incident might serve to break it. Should Greece and Turkey wrangle over the possession of a few barren rocks in the Ægean, should a Zeppelin once more come to earth in some town of Lorraine, or should a party of Teuton tourists be again molested by some discourteous French students, the artificial security that reigned in Central Europe would be at an end.