The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/"He Knows, Doesn't He?"
"HE KNOWS, DOESN'T HE?"
I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel
much frequented by the German governing
classes when an English newspaper proprietor,
after a visit to Berlin, published in his most
popular journal a map of a portion of Northern
Europe in order to show at sight his view of the
extent of the forthcoming German aggression,
The paper was lying open between a group of
gentlemen whose names have since become
prominent in relation to the war when I stepped
up to the table. The men were obviously angry,
although laughing immoderately. "Look at
that," said one of them, pointing to the map and
running his finger down the coasts of Holland,
Belgium and France to Calais." He knows,
doesn't he?"
And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter attack on British journalism ("The scaremongering of that paper is doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and England"), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year's truce in the building of battleships (" Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and we'll mind ours"), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany's object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but merely to keep the seas open to her trade. "Why," said one of the men, "nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month." "Quite so," said another, "and so far as German people go that's the beginning and end of the whole matter."