Like a traitor of melodrama, the British government had been preparing the war for a long time, not wishing to show its hand until the last moment; and Germany, lover of peace, had had to defend herself from this enemy, the worst one of all.
"God will punish England!" affirmed the doctor, looking at Ulysses.
And he not wishing to defraud her of her expectations, gallantly nodded his head....

For all he cared, God might punish England.
But in expressing himself in such a way, he felt himself agitated by a new duality.

The English had been good comrades; he remembered agreeably his voyages as an official aboard the British boats.

At the same time, their increasing power, invisible to the men on shore, monstrous for those who were living on the sea, had been producing in him a certain irritation.

He was accustomed to find them either as dominators of all the seas, or else solidly installed on all the strategic and commercial coasts.
The Doctor, as though guessing the necessity of arousing his hatred of the great enemy, appealed to his historical memories: Gibraltar, stolen by the English; the piracies of Drake; the galleons of America seized with methodical regularity by the British fleets; the landings on the coast of Spain that in other centuries had perturbed the life of the peninsula.