This sort of thing had been overdone! However at such a time it assumed a striking note of unexpectedness and daring. This Frenchman obviously overflowed with sympathy, or at all events admiration for the foe he was about to face.... And not one of us protested.... What impartiality, I thought. Was it to our credit, or discredit? I now followed the speaker's arguments with interest. He occasionally spoke so decidedly and precisely that I suspected him of dishing up for our benefit certain passages already composed for the work he was meditating. On the other hand one had the feeling that one was not the dupe of a rhetorician. I was able when necessary to verify the exactitude of his statements by my own recollections. Here he was sketching the portrait of the young German, steady and strong, accustomed from his earliest childhood to long walks with his pack on his back, his first attempts at warlike frolics, keen on swimming, shooting, and gymnastics, more sporting in reality than we were who had been won over to the rough games from over the channel. They were chaste too and had no false shame about admitting it; not exhausted, depraved, and indeed contaminated, as a result of the stupid dissipation which we appear to think necessary for our young men. I could see the companions of my excursions round Iéna again,--Otto Kraëmer, merry, affectionate, and untiring--and so virtuous--questioning me with an innocent smile, quite free of any suspicion of envy, on the pleasures of Paris. Fortin showed us how war had become inevitable for these people. Since they were suffocating at home! They were a prolific race; that was their foremost merit. The necessity and also the capacity for expansion in a country which in forty years doubles its population! There was the fruitful young sap. To them belonged the future. We were listening, silent and engrossed, leaning on our elbows.... Ladmiraut demanded some detail from time to time. He had pulled out his note-book. Guillaumin, who was beside me, seemed to be the only one who could not listen to this language without impatience; he strummed nervously on the marble table-top. Fortin went on to say that over there it was the entire populace from the Kaiser down to the last of the beggars, who dreamt of the greater Germany.... The fateful hour had struck.... He reminded us of the saying where the five sons of the German family came to demand a share of his heritage from the only son of the French family. We certainly had no luck in just happening to be the neighbours and thus the picked adversaries of this terribly covetous race, and in holding so many rich provinces that they meant to annex again in the name of ancient traditions for the Germanic Empire! Any schoolboy coming from Germany would tell you of their ambitions. To begin with they must have what remained to us of Lorraine and Champagne and Flanders, they'd see about Burgundy and the Franche-Comté, when the occasion arose!