"Yes, he’s dead--horribly. He came to attack me, and I collared him and put him on the island in the lake. I suppose he grew impatient when he heard the firing, couldn’t wait for the end, and got his fellow-prisoners to make a sort of a raft. Our sentry deserted his post, with the most praiseworthy intentions, and Reinecke took advantage of his absence to launch the raft. He was attacked by crocodiles; Reinecke lunged at one, and toppled over. I saw the whole thing: the recollection makes me sick." "Poor devil! He was a tricky sort of fellow, according to Mr. Barkworth." Tom related the incidents that had led to his occupation of the nullah. "He deserved no better fate," remarked Major Burnaby at the close of the story. "Fellows like him make one unjust, perhaps--I mean, one would rather not regard him as a typical German. Unhappily his countrymen are doing their best to make the name of Germany odious." "What are they doing, sir? What’s the war about? Of course I’ve heard nothing." Major Burnaby gave an outline of the public events that led to the war--events which all the world knows. "But the real origin of the war is Germany’s tigerish greed," he said. "One can understand that a great nation, flushed with unexampled success, conscious of power and the possession of many good qualities which only an ass would deny, should look with a certain envy and jealousy on our little islands as the owners of a world-wide empire. There are wrong-headed and sentimental people at home who make excuses for her, ask how we could expect her to be content with the present position of things, say we deny her means of expansion, and so on. But they shut their eyes to the fundamental contrast between Germany and ourselves. Our Empire is a gradual, almost an accidental, growth: much of it has been so to speak thrust upon us: you’ve only to read history to know that. We have taken up the burden of rule in barbarous countries, or countries like India and Egypt, where civilisation had decayed, and which but for us would be either bear’s gardens or hotbeds of slavery and oppression. I don’t say that our motives have always been of the purest or our methods always the best; but I do say that we have never, as a state, set before us the deliberate aim of grabbing what doesn’t belong to us, forcing all civilisations into our particular mould, and subjugating all other nations by sheer brutal terrorism. That is what Germany is doing. She hasn’t a notion of honour. She was bound to respect the neutrality of Belgium; a few days before she threw her troops across the frontier she assured the Belgian Government that she had no intention of doing so. She forced on the war when Austria was hesitating, simply because she thought she saw a unique opportunity of gaining a quick and easy victory, smashing Russia, smashing France, grabbing valuable territory, filling her coffers with millions of