WORLD'S END

Lanny had to say something, so he asked: "How come?"

"They feel the same way about the war. Jesse can't see any difference at all between French and Germans."

"I don't think that's exactly true of Robbie," said the boy, hesitatingly - for he didn't like to talk about his father in this connection. He added: "I've never understood my uncle's ideas, but I know how Robbie despises them."

"It's a case of extremes meeting, I suppose," remarked the other. "Jesse is an out-and-out revolutionist. He blames all the trouble on big financiers trying to grab colonies and trade. He says they use the governments for their own purposes; they start wars when they want something, and stop them when they've got it."

"Well, it looks like this one might have run away with them," commented the boy.

"Jesse says not so," replied the other. "He thinks the British oil men want Mesopotamia, and they've promised Constantinople to Russia, and Syria to France. Also they want to sink the German fleet. After that their oil will be safe, and they'll make peace."

"Do you believe anything like that, Marcel?"

The voice that came from behind the white silk veil had a touch of grimness. "I'd hate having to think that I'd had my face burned off to help Royal Dutch Shell increase the value of its shares!"

V

Lanny wrote to his father: "I am finding it hard to think as you want me to." And of course Robbie understood that. He had met Americans returned from France, and seen how bitter they were against the Germans; he knew how many of the young fellows had joined the French Foreign Legion, or the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American fliers fighting for France. One day Lanny received a long typewritten letter from his father, postmarked Paris. He understood that it had been brought across by some friend or employee.

"If I were with you," wrote the father, "I could answer all the things that people are telling you. As it is, I have to ask you to believe that I have the answers. You know that I have sources of information and do not say that I know something unless I do. I am making this emphatic because your happiness and indeed your whole future may be at stake, and I could never forgive myself if you were to get caught in the sticky flypaper which is now being set for the feet of Americans. If I thought there was any chance of this happening to you I would come at once and take you away."

After that solemn preamble, the head of the European sales department of Budd Gunmakers went on to remind his son that this was a war of profits. "I am making them myself," he said. "Budd's couldn't help making them unless we gave the plant away. People come and stuff them into our pockets. But I don't sell them the right to do my thinking for me.

"Germany is trying to break her way to the east, mainly to get oil, the first necessity of modern machine industry. There is oil in Rumania and the Caucasus, and more in Mesopotamia and Persia. Look up these places on the map, so as to know what I'm telling you. England, Russia, and France all have a share, while Germany has none. That's what all the shooting is about; and I am begging you to paste this up on your looking glass, or some place where you will see it every day. It's an oil man's war, and they are all patriotic, because if they lose the war they'll lose the oil. But the steel men and the coal men have worked out international cartels, so they don't have to be patriotic. They have ways of communicating across no man's land, and they do. I'm a steel man, and they talk to me, and so I get news that will never be printed."

What the steel men were doing, Robbie explained, was selling to both sides, and getting the whole world into their debt. Robbie's own income for this year of 1916 would be five times what it had been before the war, and the profits of the biggest American powder and chemical concern would be multiplied by ten. "The gentleman whom you met with me in Monte Carlo is keeping very quiet nowadays; he doesn't want to attract attention to what he is doing, which is stuffing money into all the hiding places he can find. I would wager that his profits before this slaughter is over will be a quarter of a billion dollars. He has put himself in the same position as ourselves - he couldn't help making money if he wanted to."

But that wasn't all. These international industrialists had taken entire charge of the war so far as their own properties were concerned. The military men were allowed to destroy whatever else they pleased, but nothing belonging to Krupp and Thyssen and Stinnes, the German munitions kings who had French connections and investments, or anything belonging to Schneider and the de Wendels, masters of the Comite des Forges, who had German connections and investments. Any army man who attempted to win the war by that forbidden method would be sent to some part of the fighting zone that was less dangerous for the steel kings and more dangerous for him.