"This tent is six thousand years old," he said, "it belongs to the warlike Bedouins who founded the empires of Babylon and Carthage. The restlessness of the ancient migrating people inspired them with a longing for the desert every year, and sent them forth from the city walls on profitable raids. It is this same force, Aurelle, which each summer, before the war, covered the deserted shores of Europe with nomadic tents, and it is the dim recollection of ancestral raids which, on August 1, 1914 holiday time, Aurelle, the time of migrations—incited the youngest of the barbarians to let loose their Emperor on the world. It is an old comedy which has been played for two thousand years, but the public still seem to take an interest in it. It is because there is always a fresh audience." "You are pessimistic this evening," said Aurelle. "What do you call pessimism?" said the doctor, painfully pulling off his stiff boots. "I think that men will always have passions, and that they will never cease to go for one another at regular intervals with the most energetic means which the science of their time can procure for them, and the best chosen weapons with which to break each other’s bones. I think that one sex will always try to please the other, and that from this elementary desire will eternally be born the need to vanquish rivals. With this object, nightingales, grasshoppers, prima donnas and statesmen will make use of their voices; peacocks, niggers and soldiers, of bright colours; rats, deer, tortoises and kings will go on fighting. All that is not pessimism, it is natural history!" While talking the doctor had got into his sleeping-bag, and had seized a little book from a shelf made out of a biscuit box. "Listen to this, Aurelle," said he, "and guess who wrote it. "’My regrets about the War are unceasing, and I shall consent to admire your invincible general when I see the fight ended under honourable conditions. It is true that the brilliant successes which are your delight are also mine, because these victories, if we would use fortune wisely, will procure for us an advantageous peace. But if we let the moment pass when we might appear to give peace rather than receive it, I much fear that this splendid achievement will vanish in smoke. And if fate sends us reverses I tremble to think of the peace which will be imposed on the conquered by an enemy who has the courage to refuse it to the conquerors?’" "I don’t know," said Aurelle, yawning. "Maximilian Harden?" "Senator Hanno at the Senate of Carthage." said the doctor triumphantly. "And in two thousand three hundred years some negro doctor, finding after the Great African War a speech by Lloyd George, will say, ’These old sayings are sometimes very true.’ Your formidable European War is about as important, Aurelle, as the fights between two ant-heaps in the corner of my garden in Ireland."