he wanted to hear the Gauls' story, too,
before he fully made up his mind about Caesar. But for the living
languages he had a natural gift which his father's service abroad as
military attache for a while enabled him to cultivate.

Upon being told one day that he was to go to the military school the
following autumn, he broke out in open rebellion. He had just decided,
after having passed through the stages of engine-driver, telegraph
operator, railroad-signal watchman, automobile manufacturer, and
superintendent of the city's waterworks, to build bridges over tropical
torrents that always rose in floods to try all his skill in saving his
construction work.

"I don't want to go into the army!" he said.

"Why?" asked his father, thinking that when the boy had to give his
reasons he would soon be argued out of the heresy.

"It's drilling a few hours a day, then nothing to do," Arthur replied.
"All your work waits on war and you don't know that there will ever be
any war. It waits on something nobody wants to happen. Now, if you
manufacture something, why, you see wool come out cloth, steel come out
an automobile. If you build a bridge you see it rising little by little.
You're getting your results every day; you see your mistakes and your
successes. You're making something, creating something; there's
something going on all the while that isn't guesswork. I think that's
what I want to say. You won't order me to be a soldier will you?"

The father, loath to do this, called in the assistance of an able
pleader then, Eugene Partow, lately become chief of staff of the Browns,
who was an old friend of the Lanstron family. It was not in Partow's
mind to lose such a recruit in a time when the heads of the army were
trying, in answer to the demands of a new age, to counteract the old
idea that made an officer's the conventional avocation of a gentleman of
leisurely habits.

"No army that ever worked as hard in peace as the average manufacturer
or bridge-builder was ever beaten in battle if it fought anything like
equal numbers," he said. "The officer who works hard in the army
deserves more credit than he would in any other profession because the
incentive for results seems remote. But what a terrible test of results
may be made in a single hour's action. There is nothing you have learned
or ever will learn that may not be of service to you. There is no
invention, no form of industrial organization that must not be include