“Well, you of all men are entitled to a holiday,” I said. Four years of Whitehall had made him short-sighted and round-shouldered; his square, wooden face was pallid; and his slow speech argued a tired brain. “Everything will seem a bit flat now,” muttered one of the most powerful men in England, who within the next few days or hours would be as inconsequential as myself. Beyond a narrow circle described round the Treasury Exchange, the name of Captain Hornbeck was unknown; the weight and cunning of his hand, however, had been felt for more than four years in Mexican revolutions, Greek _coups d’état_ and Russian counter-revolutions. The papers which he was destroying ranged from reports on South American credit-transfers to track-charts of North Atlantic commerce-raiders. “This is what the N.O. has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days,” he went on. “Now that we’ve finished it . . .” Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he threw open the window. From force of habit, he switched off the lights before pulling up the blind; then, as the last night of the war engulfed him in a grey eddy of fog, he laughed at his own forgetfulness. “There’s still a fair-sized mess to clean up,” I reminded him, as he raked with irresolute fingers the memoranda that constituted the Admiralty’s suggestions for the peace conference. “Ah, I must leave that to you politicians,” he laughed. “And I don’t envy you the job. A world without war . . . It’s a thing we’ve never seen, George. And when you consider that we’re all of us demoralized and most of us bankrupt . . . I suppose friend Woodrow knows what he wants, but I don’t believe any one else does. . . . Doctor feller once told me that, when a baby’s born, it comes into the world with its fists clenched. I sometimes wonder if war isn’t a natural instinct.” “Self-preservation is the first natural instinct,” I answered; “but it’s not consistent with modern methods of fighting.” “Oh, I know. This war will be a friendly scrap by comparison with the next.” “It’s stopping,” I said, “just when we were beginning to learn something of mass-production, mass-enlistment, mass-mobilization of resources, mass-destruction.” Hornbeck strolled to a vast wall-map of the world and stared at it, with his hands dug deep into his pockets. “In the next war, we shan’t attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants,” he predicted. “The air-raids and the blockade have caught the civilian.” “And no country will be allowed to remain neutral,” I added, “any more than Luxemburg and Greece in this war.” “Until, at the end, when the human population of the earth has been destroyed with typhoid-germs and poison-gas, you’ll be left with two submersible flying-tanks chasing each other among the ice of the North Pole.”