“Hanged if I can see how we are going to get out of it,” he answered Joan cheerfully. “The moment there is any threat of war, it becomes a point of honour with every nation to do nothing to avoid it. I remember my old duelling days. The quarrel may have been about the silliest trifle imaginable. A single word would have explained the whole thing away. But to utter it would have stamped one as a coward. This Egyptian Tra-la-la! It isn’t worth the bones of a single grenadier, as our friends across the Rhine would say. But I expect, before it’s settled, there will be men’s bones sufficient, bleaching on the desert, to build another Pyramid. It’s so easily started: that’s the devil of it. A mischievous boy can throw a lighted match into a powder magazine, and then it becomes every patriot’s business to see that it isn’t put out. I hate war. It accomplishes nothing, and leaves everything in a greater muddle than it was before. But if the idea ever catches fire, I shall have to do all I can to fan the conflagration. Unless I am prepared to be branded as a poltroon. Every professional soldier is supposed to welcome war. Most of us do: it’s our opportunity. There’s some excuse for us. But these men—Carleton and their lot: I regard them as nothing better than the Ménades of the Commune. They care nothing if the whole of Europe blazes. They cannot personally get harmed whatever happens. It’s fun to them.” Madge still held to her hope. God would make a wind of reason to pass over the earth. He would not smite again his people.!

“And those that have gone before?” she demanded. “Those that have won the ground from where we are fighting. Had they no need of patience? Was the cry never wrung from their lips: ‘How long, oh Lord, how long?’ Is it for us to lay aside the sword that they bequeath us because we cannot hope any more than they to see the far-off victory? Fifty years I have fought, and what, a few years hence, will my closing eyes still see but the banners of the foe still waving, fresh armies pouring to his standard?” Miss Ensor, having finished her supper, sat smoking.

“Tell me,” she said. “If it had been the photo of a woman with a bony throat and a beaky nose would you have read them?” The little room looked very cosy when Mary had made up the fire and lighted the lamp. She seated Joan in the worn horsehair easy-chair; out of which one had to be careful one did not slip on to the floor; and spread her handsome shawl over the back of the dilapidated sofa. “You’re frightened,” the child continued in a passionate, low voice. “You think that people will talk about you and look down upon you. You oughtn’t to think about yourself. You ought to think only about him and his work. Nothing else matters.”