go, I'll probably go quietly and quickly. And there may be no
other chance for me to say good-bye."

'Then you think England will be drawn in, sir?" asked Leslie
Franklin, leader of the patrol to which Dick and Harry belonged,
the Royal Blues.

"I'm afraid so," said Grenfels grimly. "There's just a chance
still, but that's all -- the ghost of a chance, you might call it.
I think it might be as well if I explained a little of what's back
of all this trouble. Want to listen? If you do, I'll try. And
if I'm not making myself clear, ask all the questions you like."

There was a chorus of assent. Grenfel sat in the middle, the
scouts ranged about him in a circle. "In the first place," he
began, "this Servian business is only an excuse. I'm not
defending the Servians -- I'm taking no sides between Servia and
Austria. Here in England we don't care about that, because we
know that if that hadn't started the war, something else would
have been found.

"England wants peace. And it seems that, every so often, she has
to fight for it. It was so when the Duke of Marlborough won his
battles at Blenheim and Ramillies and Malplaquet. Then France was
the strongest nation in Europe. And she tried to crush the others
and dominate everything. If she had, she would have been strong
enough, after her victories, to fight us over here -- to invade
England. So we went into that war, more than two hundred years
ago, not because we hated France, but to make a real peace
possible. And it lasted a long time.