I appeal to Petersen who has seen more of life than we have.”

Petersen nodded.

“You see, Holk,” continued Arne, “you were talking about the fox and the stork. Well, I have nothing against moving into the animal world, nothing at all. There happens, however, to be another fable about a bird—the ostrich. My dear Holk, you’re hiding your head in the sand, like the ostrich, and refusing to see the danger.”

Holk shifted to and fro in his chair and said: “Ah well, Alfred, who can see into the future anyway? Not you nor I. At the end of the day, everything is a matter of probability, and danger from Berlin or Potsdam is the most unlikely thing of all. The days of parades at Potsdam are over. I have nothing against old Fritz. He has no more fervent admirer than me, but everything he did seems to me a mere episode which has somehow become fatal to his country.”

“And so a country’s fame or even its greatness can be fatal to it?”

“I know it sounds strange but all the same, my dear Alfred …”

Holk broke off as Asta was heard in the next room endeavouring to pick out the accompaniment to a song on the piano. But silence fell again and Holk repeated: “Yes, Alfred, it sounds strange that fame should be fatal but such things do happen and when they do, it’s because of the natural order of things. It is just possible that a new race of world-conquerors might have flourished on those sandy marshlands of Brandenburg, where after all, the Semnonians[1] and other red-headed world-conquerors once lived, that I can admit, but to achieve this, the country would have had to undergo a long and slow process of development. And it was Frederick the Great who disturbed that process. Prussia went to bed a province and woke up a state; that was abnormal and caused by the fact that overnight or, more exactly, over a period of some forty years, Prussia was racked and torn.”

“Those aren’t your own ideas,” said Christine.

“No, and nor do they need to be; it’s sufficient to have made them my own. So please let me continue with my borrowed ideas. With all due respect to Frederick the Great, he was unique, sui generis. But I cannot admire what we can call, if you like, the posthumous Prussia, Prussia after him, always in tow to some other country. Today it’s Russia, tomorrow perhaps it will be Austria. Everything that it ever succeeded in doing was done in some sort of double harness, not under its own eagle, whether red or black. I can understand people who refer contemptuously to the Prussian cuckoo. For a state to be more than a day’s wonder, it must have frontiers, it must represent a nation.”

“There are other ingredients needed to make a state,” said Arne and both Schwarzkoppen and Christine nodded approvingly.

“Certainly,” retorted Holk. “Money, for example. But who’s joking now? Prussia and money!”

“No, not money; another trifle—a trifle that is called an idea, a faith. With the Russians, the idea still lives on that they must possess Constantinople and one day they will possess it. History is full of such examples and something similar can be found with the Prussians. It’s unwise to laugh about such things, too. Ideas like that are a force. Someone once wrote that our fate can be read in our hearts and what that inner voice says will be fulfilled. In Prussia—which, incidentally, you have been unable to tolerate ever since you were a boy—in Prussia, for the last century and a half, everything has been directed towards one great purpose. It was not old Fritz who was an episode but the period of weakness that you mentioned which was an interregnum. And now this interregnum is over. That newspaper article was right; the recruiting sergeant’s drum is moving gently through the whole country and ‘old Denmark,’ when the time comes to call the tune, will have to pay the piper, if I may mix my metaphors.