"THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Buchan John)

the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears.

He told me some queer things that explained a lot that
had puzzled me--things that happened in the Balkan
War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why
alliances were made and broken, why certain men
disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from.
The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and
Germany at loggerheads.

When I asked Why, he said that the anarchist lot
thought it would give them their chance. Everything
would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a
new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the
shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage.
Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.
Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated
Russia worse than hell.

"Do you wonder?" he cried. "For three hundred years
they have been persecuted, and this is the return
match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but
you have to go far down the backstairs to find him.
Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have
dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von
und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks
Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your
business is big, you get behind him and find a
prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and
the manners of a hog. He is the German business man
that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you're
on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the
real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little
white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a
rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the
world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of
the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father
flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga."

I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed
to have got left behind a little.

"Yes and no," he said. "They won up to a point, but they
struck a bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't
be bought, the old elemental fighting instincts of man.
If you're going to he killed you invent some kind of flag
and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to
love the thing. Those foolish devils of soldiers have
found something they care for, and that has upset the
pretty plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends