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The Greatest Invention--Lord Dunsany
"What do you think is going to happen, Jorkens?" one of us asked one day at the club.
"Happen?" Jorkens said. "That is hard to say: in the old days one had a rough idea of what other countries wanted to do and their ability to do it. But it is all different now."
"How is it different?" asked the man.
"There are so many inventions," Jorkens said, "of which we know nothing. Now that a man can carry in a bag a bomb that is more powerful than several battleships, it is hard to find out what any country can do or will do next. I will give you an example."
I was on a ship in the tropics (Jorkens told us), and we put into a port. I was tired of looking at the tropical sea, so I went ashore and walked into a tavern to see if they had any decent wines in that country. As it turned out, they hadn't. But there was a man there with a black mustache and a certain look in his eyes that made me wonder if he might not have something interesting to tell. So I asked him if I might offer him a glass of wine. Well, he was good enough to accept, and I called for a bottle of the strange local wine. When the bottle had been uncorked and the wine poured out, like liquid tropical sunlight, I watched it go down under that black mustache. And when a certain amount had gone down, he began to talk.
"We aimed at the mastery of the whole Caribbean," he said, "and don't think that because we are a little country we could not have succeeded. War is no longer a matter of armies; it depends on the intelligence of scientists. And we had a scientist who, as I have since seen proved, had no rival west of the Atlantic."
"You proved it?" I could not help saying.
"Yes," he said. "You shall hear."
I had another bottle of wine set before him, and I did hear.
"You may not have thought it," he said, "but I was in our Ministry of Warfare."
And I had not thought it, for he was not at all what one would regard as the figure of a soldier. But warfare, as he explained to me, has altered.
"Our Minister," he said, "was a cavalry officer and could not adapt his ideas to modern science. He thought of war simply as an opportunity for cavalry charges and fine uniforms and glory. We had to get rid of him in order to fulfill our just aspirations."
"And what are they?" I asked.
"Why, the domination of the whole Caribbean," he said. "And it is just that we should have it. We are the people who have been born to it."
"Of course," I said soothingly, though I did not know for which country he spoke.
"Once the Minister of Warfare was gone," he went on, "we turned our minds to modern warfare, and we began to make great progress. Modern warfare gives grand opportunities to little countries. Once, if a nation had twelve battleships it was a Great Power, and we could only obey. But what if we know how to let loose a plague capable of destroying whole nations? Must we be silent then about our just aspirations? No. We shall speak."
"Certainly," I said.
"Other nations know something of germ warfare," the stranger said. "We looked for a new and deadlier germ. And we had the man who could not only give us that, but a more effective way to spread it — his name was Silvary Carasierra. We knew that we had marvelous powers within our grasp, if only Carasierra could be kept at his work."
