OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Let Us Pray for Victory

​LET US PRAY FOR VICTORY "It is good to pray for peace, but it is better to pray for justice. It is better to pray for liberty. It is better to pray for the triumph of the right, for the victory of human freedom." Then let us pray for victory over our enemies, having no qualms, no shame, and no remorse. We know that Christ pronounced a death sentence on war, and that as soon as Christianity shall have established an ascendancy war will cease. But if anybody tells us in the meantime that by Christ's law we are to stand aside while
​a strong Power, which is in the wrong, inflicts frightful cruelties upon a weak Power which is in the right, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ's law we are to permit ourselves to be trodden upon and trampled out of being by an empire resting on violence, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ's law we are not to oppose the gigantic ambition of a "War Lord" who claims Divine right to stalk over Europe in scenes of blood, rapacity, and impurity, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that Christ's words, "Resist not evil," were intended to say that spiritual forces will of themselves overcome all forms of war (including, as they needs must, crime, disease, and death) let us answer that we simply don't believe it.
Such a clumsy and dangerous interpretation of Christ's doctrine would put an end to government, to science, and to literature, and allow the worst elements of human nature to rule the world. It would also put Christianity on the scrap-heap—Christianity "with its benevolent morality, its exquisite adaptation to the needs of human life, the consolation it brings to the house of mourning and the light with which it brightens the mystery of the grave."
God forbid that the very least of us should ​say one word that would prolong the horrors of this terrible war. But it is just because we hate war that at the end of these 365 days we still think we must carry it on. It is just because our hearts are bleeding from the sacrifices we have made, and have still to make, that we feel they must be compelled to bleed.
Let us, then, pray with all the fervour of our souls for Belgium, for Poland, for Italy, for Russia, for France, but above all, for our own beloved country, mother of nations, mother, too, of some of the bravest and best yet born on to the earth, that as long as there remains one man or woman of British blood above British soil this England and her Empire may be ours—ours and our children's.
* ↑ New York Times.
* ↑ Macaulay.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/One of the Oldest, Feeblest, and Least Capable of Men

​ONE OF THE OLDEST, FEEBLEST, AND LEAST CAPABLE OF MEN That time, as we now know, never came, but a still more fatal time did come—the cruel, ironical, and sinister time of July 28, 1914, when one of the oldest, feeblest, and least capable of living men, the Emperor of Austria, under pretence of avenging the death of the heir- presumptive to his throne, signed with his trembling hand, which could scarcely hold the pen, the first of his many proclamations of war, and so touched the button of the monstrous engine that set Europe aflame.
The Archduke Ferdinand was foully done to death in discharging a patriotic duty, but to think that the penalty imposed on the world for the assassination of a man of his calibre and capacity for usefulness (or yet for the violation of the principles of public safety, thereby involved) has been the murdering of millions of men of many nationalities, the destruction of an entire kingdom, the burning of historic cities, the impoverishment of the rich and the starvation of the poor, the outraging of women and the slaughter of children, is also to think that for the past 365 days the destinies of humanity have been controlled by demons, who must be shrieking with laughter at the stupidities of mankind.
Thank God, we are not required to think ​anything quite so foolish, although we cannot escape from a conclusion almost equally degrading. Victor Hugo used to say that only kings desired war, and that with the celebration of the United States of Europe we should see the beginning of the golden age of Peace. But the events of the tremendous days from July 28 to August 4, 1914, show us with humiliating distinctness that though Kaisers, Emperors, Crown Princes, and Archdukes may be the accidental instruments of invisible powers in plunging humanity into seas of blood, a war is no sooner declared by any of them, however feeble or fatuous, than all the nations concerned make it their own. That was what happened in Central Europe the moment Austria declared war on Serbia, and the history of man on this planet has no record of anything more pitiful than the spectacle of Germany— "sincere, calm, deep-thinking Germany," as Carlyle called her, whose triumph in 1870 was "the hopefullest fact" of his time—stifling her conscience in order to justify her participation in the conflict.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/How the War Entered Italy

​HOW THE WAR ENTERED ITALY Then, by one of the most vivid, if pathetic, of the flashes as of lightning that have shown us the drama of the past 365 days, we saw the actual war come to Italy. It came in a profoundly impressive form—the dead body of young Bruno Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator. Fighting for France, Bruno had fallen in a gallant charge at the front, and his brother, who was by his side, had carried his body out of the trenches and brought it home. We who know Rome do not need to be told how it was received there. We can see the dense mass of uncovered heads in the Piazza delle Terme, stretching from the doors of the railway station to the bronze fountain at the top of the Via Nazionale, and we can hear the deep swell of the Garibaldian hymn, which comes like a challenge as well as a moan from 50,000 throats. Not for the first time was a dead Garibaldi being borne through the streets of Rome, and those of us who remembered the earlier day knew well that with the body of this Italian boy the war had entered Italy.
Then, at a crisis in Italy's internal government, our enemy, having failed to buy, bribe, or corrupt Italy, began to threaten her. Out of the delirium of his intoxicated conscience, which no longer shrank from crime, he told Italy that ​if she dared to break her neutrality her fate should be as the fate of Belgium. That frightened some of us for a moment. We thought of Venice, of Florence, of Assisi, of Subiaco, of Naples, and of Rome, and, remembering the methods by which Germany was beating and bludgeoning her way through the war, our hearts trembled and thrilled at a dreadful vision of the lovely and beloved Italian land under the heel of a ruthless aggressor—of the destruction of the history of Christendom as it had been written by great artists on canvas and by great architects in stone through the long calendar of nearly two thousand years. But we also thought of Savoy, of Palestro, of Casale, of Caprera, and of "Roma o morte," and told ourselves that, come what might, victory or defeat, the children of Victor Emanuel III would never allow themselves to buy the ease and safety of their bodies by the corruption and degradation of their souls.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/King Edward's Last Visit to Berlin

​KING EDWARD'S LAST VISIT TO BERLIN
As happens in every drama, a great deal of the tragic mischief had occurred before the curtain rose. Always before the passage of war over the world there comes the far-off murmur of its approaching wings. Each of us in this case had heard it, distinctly or indistinctly, according to the accidents of personal experience. I think I myself heard it for the first time clearly when in the closing year of King Edward's reign I came to know (it is unnecessary to say how) what our Sovereign's feeling had been about his last visit to Berlin. It can do no harm now to say that it had been a feeling of intense anxiety. The visit seemed necessary, even imperative, therefore the King would not shirk his duty. But for his country, as well as for himself, he had feared for his reception in Germany, and on his arrival in Berlin, and during his drive from the railway station with the Kaiser, he had watched and listened to the demonstrations in the streets with an emotion which very nearly amounted to dread.
The result had brought a certain relief. With the best of all possible intentions, the newspapers in both capitals had reported that King Edward's reception had been enthusiastic. It hadn't been that—at least, it hadn't seemed to be that to the persons chiefly concerned. But it had been just ​cordial enough not to be chilling, just warm enough to carry things off, to drown that far-off murmur of war which was like the approach of a mighty wind. Then, during the next days, there had been the usual banqueting, with the customary toasting to the amity of the two great nations, whose interests were so closely united by bonds of peace! And then the return drive to the railway station, the clatter of horsemen in shining armour, the adieux, the throbbing of the engine, the starting of the train, and then … "Thank God, it's over! "If the invisible powers had really been struggling over the destiny of men, how the evil half of them must have shrieked with delight that day as the Kaiser rode back to Potsdam and our King returned to London!
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Pen-Portrait of the Archduke Ferdinand

​PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND Then the Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, whose assassination was the ostensible cause of this devastating war—what kind of man ​was he? Quite a different person from the Crown Prince, and yet, so far as I could judge, just as little worthy of the appalling sacrifice of human life which his death has occasioned.
Not long before his tragic end I spent a month under the same roof with him, and though the house was only an hotel, it was situated in a remote place, and though I was not in any sense of the Archduke's party, I walked and talked frequently with most of the members of it, and so, with the added help of daily observation, came to certain conclusions about the character of the principal personage.
A middle-aged man, stiff-set, heavy-jawed, with a strong step, and a short manner; obviously proud, reserved, silent, slightly imperious, self-centred, self-opinionated, well-educated in the kind of knowledge all such men must possess, but narrow in intellect, retrograde in sympathy, a stickler for social conventions, an almost unyielding upholder of royal rights, prerogatives, customs, and usages (although by his own marriage he had violated one of the first of the laws of his class, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resist it), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of the Kaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country—such was the general impression made on one British observer by the Archduke Ferdinand. The man is dead; he took no part in the war, ​except unwittingly by the act of dying, and therefore one could wish to speak of him with respect and restraint. Otherwise it might be possible to justify this estimate of his character by the narration of little incidents, and one such, though trivial in itself, may perhaps bear description. The younger guests of the hotel in the mountains had got up a fancy dress ball, and among persons clad in all conceivable costumes, including those of monks, cardinals, and even popes, a lady of demure manners, who did not dance, had come downstairs in the habit of a nun. This aroused the superstitious indignation of the Archduke, who demanded that the lady should retire from the room instantly, or he would order his carriage and leave the hotel at once. Of course, the inevitable happened—the Archduke's will became law, and the lady went upstairs in tears, while I and two or three others (Catholics among us) thought and said, "Heaven help Europe when the time comes for its destinies to depend largely on the judgment of a man whose bemuddled intellect cannot distinguish between the morality of the real world and of an entirely fantastic and fictitious one."
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Great Scenes in Great Britain

​GREAT SCENES IN GREAT BRITAIN Nor did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink and the temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At the darkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tour in a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though my journey lay through three or four of the least industrial and most placid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand. The high roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; the broad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stations or depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the hay crop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemed to be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who had nothing left to do but to wait for death.
The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large hoardings on the face of a public building recorded in golden letters the ​names of the townsmen who had joined the colours. In every little shop window along the high road to Bath there were portraits of the King, Kitchener, Jellicoe, French, and Joffre, flanked sometimes by pictures of poor, burnt and blackened Belgium.
On the edge of Dartmoor, in Drake's old town, Tavistock, I saw a thrilling sight—thrilling yet simple and quite familiar. Eight hundred men were leaving for France. In the cool of the evening they drew up with their band, four square in the market-place under the grey walls of the parish church, a thousand years old. The men of a regiment remaining behind had come to see their comrades off, bringing their own band with them. For a short half-hour the two bands played alternately, "Tipperary," "Fall In," "We Don't want to Lose You," and all the other homely but stirring ditties with which Tommy has cheered his soul. The open windows round the square were full of faces, the balconies were crowded, and some of the townspeople were perched on the housetops. Suddenly the church clock struck eight, the hour for departure; a bugle sounded; a loud voice gave the word of command like a shot out of a musket; it was repeated by a score of other sharp voices running down the line, and then the two bands, and the men, and all the people in the windows, on the balconies and on the roofs (except such of ​us as had choking throats) played and sang "For Auld Lang Syne." Was the spirit of our mighty old Drake in his Tavistock town that day?
"Come on, gentlemen, there's time to finish the game, and beat the Spaniards, too!"
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Hymns of Hate

​HYMNS OF HATE About this time also we became conscious of a fierce, delirious, intoxicating hate of our people which was developing in the hearts of our enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia and the Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of the German Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it was Britain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it "sacred hate") were composed, recited, and sung:
French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot,
We love them not, we hate them not,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe, and one alone— England!
England was not moved to retaliate in kind. We remembered what the German Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowed ourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in the German race—the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilish hate of all. We also reflected that it ​was a form of hatred not unfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equally tragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on the sufferer's own head. But as no sane father of a family would make free of his children's nursery the deranged relative who required the protection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that there was only one safe way with our aliens as a whole—to shut them up.
God forbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were under suspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that some of them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, passionately opposing Germany's objects in this war and loathing Germany's methods. We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathies can rise even higher than nationality into the realm of "human empire." We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, and deeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakable hardships from the accident of German origin. It is painful to think of some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses we frequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shut up behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among the inevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. In putting the great body ​of our enemy aliens under control we did no more than our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at the front. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and they come out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world can never be the same place as before—the devil has played too hard a game with it.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Nature Goes Her Own Way

​NATURE GOES HER OWN WAY We found it heart-breaking. But it has been always so. I was in Naples during the whole period of the last great eruption of Vesuvius, and, looking through the gloom of the heavens, piled high with the whorls of fire and smoke that were covering the Vesuvian valleys and villages with a grey shroud, waist deep, of volcanic dust, I thought the face of Nature in that sweet spot could never be the same again; but when I went back to it a year later I could see no difference. I sailed south through the Straits of Messina a few weeks before the earthquake, and, returning ​north a few months later, I looked eagerly for the change which I imagined must have been made by the frightful upheaval of the earth that had killed hundreds of thousands, and shaken the soul of the entire human family, but I could see no change at all, even through the strongest field-glasses, until I came within sight of the waste and wreckage of the little works of men. Yes, Nature goes her own way, winter and summer, seedtime and harvest, healing her own wounds, but taking no thought of ours.
Yet, cruel as Nature seemed to be at the beginning of the spring, it was not so cruel as man. With the better weather our enemies began to devise and put into operation new and more devilish methods of warfare. Perhaps this was a result of their fear, for there is no cruelty so cruel as the cruelty that comes of fear, and no inhumanity so inhuman. Having expressed themselves as shocked by our alleged use of dum-dum bullets, they were now ransacking their laboratory for gases that would burst the lungs of our soldiers, and for inflammable oils that would set them afire as if they were criminals tarred and feathered and tied to a stake. Their battleships, built to fight craft of their own kind, or at least fortresses capable of replying to their fire, were now sent out to bombard innocent watering-places lying breast open to the sea. Their air-craft, constructed for reconnaissances, were ordered to drop bombs out of the clouds on ​to sleeping cities in the darkness of the night. And their submarines, tolerated by international courts only as weapons of attack on warships, were authorized to sink harmless merchantmen, without any word of warning, or any effort to save life. Could scientific knowledge under the direction of moral insanity go one step farther? Flying in the highest sky, hiding behind the densest clouds, stealing across the heavens in the dark hours, dropping fireballs on to the silent earth, sneaking back in the dawn; and then sailing through the womb of the great deep, rising like a serpent to spit death at innocent ships, diving to avoid destruction and scudding away under cover of the empty sea—what a spectacle of divine power at the service of devilish passion! It was difficult to believe that our enemies had not gone mad. They were no longer fighting like men, but like demons.
# The Cask

Crofts' first novel, a detective story written during absence from work due to a long illness.
THE CASK
by FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS 166-178 ADELAIDE STREET WEST TORONTO
Manufactured in Great Britain
To
Dr. Adam A. C. Mathers,
IN APPRECIATION OF HIS KINDLY
CRITICISM AND HELP.

### CONTENTS

PART I—LONDON
CHAPTER
* A STRANGE CONSIGNMENT
* INSPECTOR BURNLEY ON THE TRACK
* THE WATCHER ON THE WALL
* A MIDNIGHT INTERVIEW
* FELIX TELLS A STORY
* THE ART OF DETECTION
* THE CASK AT LAST
* THE OPENING OF THE CASK
PART II—PARIS
* M. LE CHEF DE LA SÛRETÉ
* WHO WROTE THE LETTER?
* MM. DUPIERRE ET CIE
* AT THE GARE ST. LAZARE
* THE OWNER OF THE DRESS
* M. BOIRAC MAKES A STATEMENT
* THE HOUSE IN THE AVENUE DE L’ALMA
* INSPECTOR BURNLEY UP AGAINST IT
* A COUNCIL OF WAR
* LEFARGE HUNTS ALONE
* THE TESTING OF AN ALIBI
* SOME DAMNING EVIDENCE
PART III—LONDON AND PARIS
* A NEW POINT OF VIEW
* FELIX TELLS A SECOND STORY
* CLIFFORD GETS TO WORK
* MR. GEORGES LA TOUCHE
* DISAPPOINTMENT
* A CLUE AT LAST
* LA TOUCHE’S DILEMMA
* THE UNRAVELLING OF THE WEB
* A DRAMATIC DÉNOUEMENT
* CONCLUSION
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1957, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 66 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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