used frequent gestures as he warmed with his talk.

Gertie could not take her eyes from the cruel steel blade of the
cutlass. "I wish there were no awful things to kill people with. I don't
believe God meant people to kill each other in battle any more than to
kill each other when they get mad."

Captain Clarke smiled at her disturbed look. "That is one of the most
terrible questions human beings have ever had to answer, little girl. I
thought as you do once, Gertie, before the Civil War broke out. I
loathed the histories and pictures of fighting. My schoolmates used to
dub me a sissy because I hated the sight of blood. But when President
Lincoln called for volunteers to save our country, when I realized that
it was a choice between having one great free country with liberty in it
for both blacks and whites, or letting our own race and kin leave us in
hatred to continue the wickedness of human slavery right at our doors,
it didn't take me long to decide. War and all unnecessary suffering
inflicted by human beings upon each other, are hideous. But have you
ever thought how much more of such suffering there would be if parents
didn't inflict suffering upon their children to make them control their
ugly passions? If our courts didn't punish people for being cruel to
other people? And when it isn't a child or one or two grown men or women
who try to be cruel or unjust, but a whole nation, what then? Surely
other nations should come to the rescue of the right, even if it means
war. You wouldn't let a big dog kill a little one without trying to save
it, would you, Gertie?"

Gertie mutely shook her head.

"Neither should Christian nations allow weaker peoples nor any part of
their own people to be unjustly treated, when it is in their power to
prevent it. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' will some day be a question
every nation must answer as well as every individual."

"But most of the world's wars have been to take other nations' rights
away from them, not to protect them," objected Ernest.

"Yes, on one side, but in every war there has always been the side that
fought to protect its loved ones and its homes from the brutality of
conquerors. There is hideous wrong in every war, but the wrong is in the
hearts of those who would rob and oppress those weaker than themselves,
not in the patriots and heroes who resist. But I didn't mean to deliver
a lecture. I'd rather tell you about the brave boy who wielded this
cutlass."