art
of the game. There was a handful of German prisoners I saw, talking with
their guard and exchanging smokes. One was a barber in a country town.
The man who had him in tow was an English barber. Bless you, they were
talking like one o'clock! That German barber didn't want anything in
life except plenty to eat and drink, to be a good husband and good
father, and to save enough money to buy a little house of his own. The
Englishman was just the same. He'd as soon have had that German for
a pal for a day's fishing or a walk in the country, as any one else.
They'd neither of them got anything against the other. Where the hell is
this spirit of hatred? You go down the line, mile after mile, and most
little groups of men facing one another are just the same. Here and
there, there's some bitter feeling, through some fighting that's seemed
unfair, but that's nothing. The fact remains that those millions of men
don't hate one another, that they've got nothing to hate one another
about, and they're being driven to slaughter one another like savage
beasts. For what? Mr. Stenson might supply an answer. Your great editors
might. Your great Generals could be glib about it. They could spout
volumes of words, but there's no substance about them. I say that in
this generation there's no call for fighting, and there didn't ought to
be any."

"You are not only right, but you are splendidly right, Mr. Cross,"
Julian declared. "It's human talk, that."

"It's just a plain man's words and thoughts," was the simple reply.

"And yet," Fenn complained, in his thin voice, "if I talk like that,
they call me a pacifist, a lot of rowdies get up and sing `Rule
Britannia', and try to chivy me out of the hall where I'm speaking."

"You see, there's a difference, lad," Cross pointed out, setting down
the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes
that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to
hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being
brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like
it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and
anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in
the world when we're driven to do this protecting business wholesale
and being forced into murdering on a scale which only devils could have
thought out and imagined. It's the men at the top that are responsible
for this wa