-loads
to-day and taken away from us for three years.

Three years! Why, the lad is a mere child when he goes--one-and-twenty
on his last birthday, bless him!--still wanting a mother's care of his
stomach and his clothes, and a father's heavy stick across his back from
time to time to keep him from drink and too much love-making.

Three years! When he comes back he is a man, has notions of his own, has
seen the world and cares no more about his native village and the narrow
cottage where he used to run in and out bare-footed, bare-chested,
bare-headed and comfortably dirty from head to foot.

Three years! And what are the chances that he come back at all? Bosnia?
Where in the world is that? And if you are a soldier, why then you go to
war, you get shot at, killed may be, or at any rate maimed. Three years!
You may never come back! And when you do you are not the same youngster
whom your mother kissed, your father whacked, and your sweetheart wept
over.

Three years! Nay, but 'tis a lifetime. Mother is old, she may never see
her son again. Girls are vain and fickle, they will turn their thoughts
in other directions--there are the men who have done their military
service, who have paid their toll to the abominable government up at
Budapest and who are therefore free to court and free to marry.

Aye! Aye! That's how it is. They must go through with it, though they
hate it all--every moment of it. They hate to be packed into railway
carriages like so many dried heads of maize in a barn, they hate to wear
the heavy cloth clothes, the hard boots, the leather pouches and belts.
My God, how they hate it!

And the rude alien sergeant, with his "Vorwaerts!" and "Marsch!" and
"Rechts" and "Links"--I ask you in the name of the Holy Virgin what kind
of gibberish is that?

But they must all go!--all those, at least, who are whole and sound in
body. Bless them! They are sound enough when they go! It is when they
come back! . . .

Yes! They must all go, those who are sound in eyes and wind and limb,
and it is very difficult to cheat the commission who come to take our
lads away. There was Benko, for instance; he starved himself for three
months this summer, hoping to reduce his chest measurements by a few
needful centimetres; but it was no use. The doctor who examined him said
that with regular food and plenty of exercise he would soon put on more
flesh, and he would get both for the next three years. And Janos--you
remember?