And when it comes to schemes of warfare then a kind of delirium of cunning descends upon Kraft. He is full of devices such as we poor fools cannot invent; sudden attacks without a declaration of war, vast schemes for spy systems and assassin-like disguises, the cowing of a country by the wholesale shooting of uncivil non-combatants, breaches of neutrality, national treacheries, altered dispatches, forged letters, diplomatic lies, a perfect world-organisation of Super-sneaks. Our poor cousin, Michael, the German, has listened to such wisdom only too meekly. Poor Michael, with his honest blue eyes wonder-lit, has tried his best to be a very devil, and go where Kraft’s cousin, Bernhardi, the military “expert,” has led him. (So far it has led him into the ditches of Liège and the gorges of the Ardennes and much hunger and dirt and blood.) And Kraft over here has watched with an intolerable envy Berlin lying and bullying and being the very Superman of Welt Politik. He has been talking, writing, praying us to do likewise, to strike suddenly before war was declared at the German fleet, to outrage the neutrality of Denmark, to seize Holland, to do something nationally dishonest and disgraceful. Daily he has raged at our milk and water methods. At times we have seemed to him more like a lot of Woodrow Wilsons than reasonable sane men. And he is still at it. Only a few days ago I took up the paper that has at last moved me to the very plain declarations of this article. It was an English daily paper, and Kraft was telling us, as usual, and with his usual despairful sense of our stupidity, how to conduct this war. And what he said was this—that we have to starve Germany—not realising that with her choked railways and her wasted crops Germany may be trusted very rapidly to starve herself—and that, if we do not prevent them, foodstuffs will go into Germany by way of Holland and Italy. So he wants us to begin at once a hostile blockade of Holland and Italy, or better, perhaps, to send each of these innocent and friendly countries an ultimatum forthwith. He wants it done at once, because otherwise the Berlin Krafts, some Delbruck or Bernhardi, or that egregious young statesman, the Crown Prince, may persuade the Prussians to get in their ultimatum first. Then we should have no chance of doing anything internationally idiotic at all, unless, perhaps, we seized a port in Norway. It might be rather a fine thing, he thinks upon reflection, to seize a port in Norway.