Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first

man you meet is Prince _von und zu_ Something, an elegant young man who talks

Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get

behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the

manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers

the shakes. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the

real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a

bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling

the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar, because his

aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the

Volga.”

 

I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a

little.

 

“Yes and no,” he said. “They won up to a point, but they struck a bigger thing

than money, a thing that couldn’t be bought, the old elemental fighting

instincts of man. If you’re going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and

country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing. Those

foolish devils of soldiers have found something they care for, and that has

upset the pretty plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends haven’t played

their last card by a long sight. They’ve gotten the ace up their sleeves, and

unless I can keep alive for a month they are going to play it and win.”

 

“But I thought you were dead,” I put in.