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“I’d like to have seen the Huns get a taste of their own medicine,” Mr. Carroll continued, his eyes gleaming beneath their heavy white eyebrows. “Only a month or two more of the war and they’d have seen their soil invaded, their towns in flames, and the Allies would have marched into Berlin. Now hear them talk! They don’t know they’re beaten!”

“I dare say they suspected it when they handed over their fleet,” said Stacey calmly.

“You don’t agree with me, son?” Mr. Carroll exclaimed.

Stacey shook his head. “It would have cost thousands of lives more,” he remarked, helping himself to almonds.

“Not so many! Not so many!” his father insisted.

“Some,” said Stacey. “However,” he added in a dry voice, “to do our leaders justice, I don’t think they gave that point undue importance. The truth was we’d have had to pause pretty soon, anyway. Our troops were fagged, our lines of communication were impossibly long, and we’d shot off most of our ammunition. A pause would have given the Germans a chance to fall back on a nice short line all prepared for them, and it would have taken another tremendous battle to break through again,—and there was winter already upon us.”