While I was enjoying myself thus, among the towns and villages on the banks of the Danube, admiring the scenery, cultivating the acquaintance of the industrious rural population of the great river, and making an occasional trip into the interior, the dogs of war were let loose, and the curtain rose on the darkest tragedy of the nineteenth century.

 

The comic and the tragic are inextricably mingled in this world. I believe that this is no accident, but, like everything else, a special arrangement. “All fun makes man a fool,” but “all sorrow” makes him a desperado. The feeling of anxiety aroused by the war news was, I may say, mitigated by the manner of its announcement.

 

“Sir,” cried Lancey, bursting into the cabin one afternoon while I was preparing for a trip ashore, “the Roossians ’as declared war, an’ the whole country is gettin’ hup in harms!”

 

Of course I had been well aware for some time past that there was a prospect, nay, a probability, of war; but I had not allowed myself to believe it, because I have a strong natural tendency to give civilised men credit for more sense than they appear to possess. That Russia would really draw the sword, and sacrifice millions of treasure, and thousands of her best young lives, to accomplish an object that could be more easily and surely attained by diplomacy, with the expenditure of little money and no bloodshed, seemed to me incredible. That the other European nations should allow this state of things to come to pass, seemed so ridiculous that I had all along shut my eyes to facts, and proceeded on my voyage in the confidence of a peaceful solution of the “Eastern question.”

 

“In days of old,” I said to my skipper, in our last conversation on this subject, which we were fond of discussing, “the nations were less educated than now, and less imbued perhaps with the principles of the peace-teaching gospel, which many of them profess to believe; but now the Christian world is almost out of its teens; intercommunication of ideas and interests is almost miraculously facile. Thought is well-nigh instantaneously flashed from hemisphere to hemisphere, if not from pole to pole; commerce is so highly cultivated that international exhibitions of the raw material and the fabrics of all nations are the order of the day; while good-will between man and man—to say nothing of woman—is so prevalent, that I really find it hard to believe in the possibility of a great European war.”

 

“Nevertheless,” replied Mr Whitlaw, in a tone of cynicism, to which at times he gave pretty free indulgence, “the Crimean war occurred in the nineteenth century, and the American civil war, and the young widows of the Franco-Prussian war are not yet grey-haired, while their children have scarcely reached their teens. Truly, civilisation and the progress of knowledge, which men boast of so much, seem to be of little value.”

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