Quotation

But a promissory note signed, with collateral laid against it, was a serious thing, he was finding. While perhaps some would see it as a small issue, the fact was, if debts remained unpaid, whatever followed would genuinely be the collapse of civilization as any of them would know it, Archer included. And he and millions of others had just fought a world war to ensure that neither anarchy nor fascism nor anything else would replace the reasonable screwing over of people without money by those who possessed damn near all of it. === He had found the Italians the far easier of the pair. They didn’t really want to fight, he reckoned, because every time he’d run into some, they were either drunk or eating their dinner. He wasn’t surprised they’d turned on Mussolini and stuck his head up on a pike. They probably wanted to simply get back to their pasta and bottles of wine and their women.