“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 be 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 haven’t played their last card by a long sight. They’ve gotten the ace up their sleeves, and unless I can keep alive for a month they are going to play it and win.”

“But I thought you were dead,” I put in.

“ Mors janua vitae ,” he smiled. (I recognized the quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) “I’m coming to that, but I’ve got to put you wise about a lot of things first. If you read your newspaper, I guess you know the name of Constantine Karolides?”