The world is not, in fact, a stage, where the corpses get up after the play, and go for a drink and a laugh. It is a world of cruelty and blood, fire and war, hunger and slavery, loss and pain, where death is real, corpses rot in fly-infested heaps, the vaults of national banks are emptied of their gold by the enemy's army, wounds do not always heal and the dead stay forever dead, where great and famous cities and cultures centuries old can be dissolved and plundered to nothing in a week, where defeated millions can be marched off in chains to exhaustion and death, loving families torn apart forever in a minute of horror, happy homes reduced in seconds to blackened charnel houses full of screams, and civilised and gentle empires replaced in the twinkling of an eye by evil and rapacious successors or by chaos - a world in which the rulers of nations can by a single incautious false move, done often through bravado or wounded self-regard, lose forever the safety and peace of those whom they govern, and whose safety is their chief concern.