"Well, say," some one had interrupted, "it wouldn't be a bad plan, then, to do one's best to get that half-day's advance?" "Useless! Count your population, consider your aspirations. Think of the finances. Finances! There is not a country of great armaments that could maintain war for six weeks, nor one that could even endure three years' preparation for war.... Ask the great banks, which have the world in leading-strings, emperors and kings as well as peoples; don't deceive yourselves; war is impossible, im-pos-si-ble! We are witnessing, with your manœuvres, the final deeds of a prehistoric age.... Turn your eyes to the future, gentlemen, and all this bedizened and vociferous gang will seem to you like children's toys!" "But Germany--the militant party--the Pangermanists?" "Germany is a pacific nation, industrial and commercial, which uses its cannon as an advertising dodge. What we lack--don't you know?--is precisely business sense. And Germany has business sense. The military party? A drop of water in a lake. The Pangermanists? Advertising men in the pay of the national industry. In the first place, the Emperor, as every one says who has seen him near at hand, is a secret friend of France ... and I will add, the most republican of us all. Socialism, that's his enemy! ... The army that we need is not a rabble of soldiers, but a group of men bent upon keeping the peace. Humanity is on the march--it can never be repeated too often--toward a future of liberty, equality, fraternity. Ah, you must reckon with economic rivalry; that is the law of life." "Precisely so." Memory, quickened no doubt by her feverish condition, brought back to the young wife with extraordinary precision, even to the least of them, these utterances overheard at her solitary little table. True, she had amused herself with repeating them to the sublieutenant, her husband--she even recalled the moment--he was splashing in his bath, soaping himself, on his return from the manœuvres. He had laughed with all his heart, for when Jean had come back from the manœuvres he was another man from what he had been when going to them. Only a few days of presence with the corps, among his military comrades, had transformed him or, more correctly, had restored him to his normal disposition; or, in any case, had made him victor over the indolence with which he usually replied to the fine talkers of Paris.