For how much longer will the Austrian officer be allowed—or condemned—to remain “at play”? Is the day close, or is it far, in which he will once more get to work in earnest?

Neither politician nor diplomat can answer that question; and prophets are out of date. But whenever that day comes—as it is bound to come—it requires no prophet to foretell that the subject of these papers will do his duty enthusiastically, and will therefore be as formidable an adversary as only an enthusiast can be. To those who know Austria chiefly as a seething-pot of national antagonisms, viewed through the medium of newspaper paragraphs, the Austrian army may well seem but a bundle of separate parts, loosely knit together, and in constant danger of falling apart. We who see it close, know it to be a block, welded to one mass by the double cement of loyalty and of comradeship, whose hold is stronger than the pull of individual nationality,—and animated by one common zeal.

That this zeal should be fed by the hope that peace will not prove eternal is surely only human. In 1908, and again in quite recent days, this prospect appeared for a time so imminent, and the chances of the diplomats making a mess of matters so good, that the number of disappointed hearts when the settlement came could easily be calculated by the number of lieutenants in the Austrian army.