tures downstairs. I was in that charge across
those hellish ridges. Over two thousand of us fell dead in half an hour,
but we gained the victory. More Germans were killed that day--that
sweltering August afternoon--than English in your whole South African War
that took you years! The flower of Germany fell at Gravelotte; that was
human life with a vengeance! But an Empire rose out of my comrades'
ashes. And that's all it's for, this human life of yours: for the
master-builders to lay out in their wisdom on the upward road."

The schoolboy was carried away. In the sudden eloquence of this strange
outburst, with its poetic frenzy, its ruthless idealism, its wild
bloodthirsty nobility, the youthful listener lost sight of its
irrelevancy, or rather it was the irrevelant features that flared up first
in his brain. It was a childish question, but here was a very child, and
he could not help asking the fierce old soldier whether he had escaped
without a wound.

"Without a scratch," was the reply. "I come home. I leave the army. I
ally my human life with one that is all but divine. My Queen is struck
down dead at my side within a year. And you expect me to pity the veriest
pawn in the game!"

The boy was never to forget these bitter speeches altogether; there was
not a single sentence of them that he failed to recall at one time or
another word for word. He would see a wild arm waving, wisps of smoke
from a waving pipe, a core of nicotine in a curve of amber, and the Turk's
face glistening in its heat like that of the hard old man himself. He
would hear the cynical and scornful voice softening in a breath to the
simple, tender, and domestic humanity of his race. The voice and the face
were with him throughout that night of his own manifold misery; but the
time had not come for so young a boy to realise that Dr. Baumgartner had
begun to say one thing, and been carried away like his listener.

POINTS OF VIEW

On the following morning, the ominous Friday of this disastrous week,
there was a letter for Mr. Upton on the breakfast-table down in
Leicestershire. This circumstance was not so usual as it sounds, because
Mr. Upton conducted all his correspondence from his office at the works.
If you simply put the name of the village, as he did on his stationery, to
the works it went; it was necessary to direct your letter to the hall if
you wished it to be delivered there; and few there were who had anythin