Till the sword has done its work, as firmly and as thoroughly as the surgeon’s scalpel, there is not one of the allied nations which can or will think of peace. Then and then only will come the end of the war. CHAPTER THE LAST GERMANY AND THE ALLIES Once upon a time, in the careless, happy days before the war, a Royal Scotch Princess was married one fine morning to a Royal Irish Prince in a Royal English chapel. The chapel was ancient and small, and the young pair had so many friends that though not nearly all of them could be invited to the ceremony, they filled it to overflowing. Besides the Sovereign Head of both their houses and the State, there were present two Queens (I had almost said two fairy Godmothers) who walked down the chapel hand-in-hand looking as sweet and almost as young as the bride herself, I forget how many other princes and princesses, and scores and scores of the great lights of the land and especially of the legal profession (for where the country-to-be-ruled is there will the lawyers be gathered together). There were not many young people—the occasion was too important and the seats too few—and, except for the brothers and sisters and cousins of the two principals nearly all the guests were married and arrived in couples (like the animals coming into the ark out of the rain) dressed in their finest and full of their own or their ancestors’ importance. For to be there at all, you understand, you had to be SOMEBODY, or at least to the third and fourth generation SOMEBODY’S offspring, unless you belonged to that mischievous but necessary profession the British Press, the representatives of which, the only blot on this brilliant assembly, were crowded together in a narrow position of vantage so close to the highest and furthest back row of the seats of the mighty that the shadows of the aigrettes in front quivered and danced upon their note-books. To the strains of the organ, appropriately tender and jubilant by turns, the chapel gradually filled with its distinguished audience, and almost the last to arrive before the Royal party were an old old servant of the State and his matronly spouse, who took their places on two of the gilded chairs immediately below the Press box. Before she shook out the folds of her dress for the last time the lady turned round and, staring straight into the face of the newspaper man behind her, at a range of about two feet, said to her husband in a loud, clear voice (he is rather deaf), “Oh, it’s only reporters.” Until you have tried it you have no idea of the degree of polite contempt which can be put into that last word. And even when you have tried, and tried your hardest, you will still, if you are only an amateur at the game, fall far short of the dizzy height of scorn reached by this professional expert without any conscious effort at all. For pride of rank and contempt of her inferiors had become to her second nature.