e twisted in his blouse.

Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same shell burst
threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the
flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush
toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the
automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric
current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of
keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war
as a spectator--as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it.
Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the
whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors' bills, and,
while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and
harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with
a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.

The position of him and his comrades struck him as tragically ludicrous.
Were they grown men? Had they reasoning minds? Were they of the great
races that had given the world steam-power, electric power, anaesthesia,
and antiseptics? Had they the religion of Christ? Had they an
inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy? Did
they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries? Would they
shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine
Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese
porcelain into fragments with an axe?

Yes; oh, yes!

Here were beings created in the likeness of their Maker, whose criterion
of superiority over other animals was in these symbols and not in that
of tooth, claw, or talon, disembowelling their fellow creatures. Here
were beings huddled together like a lot of puppies or cubs on an island
in the midst of carnage which was not a visitation of the Almighty, but
of their own making. And suicide and homicide were against the law in
the lands of both the Browns and the Grays!

The whole business was monstrous, lunatic, inconceivable. Yet he himself
was one of the actors, without the character or the courage to break
free of the machine which was taking lives with the irresponsibility of
a baby hammering at the jewels of a watch. The fact that he knew better
made him far more culpable, he thought, than little Peterkin or any of
his comrades. Yes, he was despicable; he was a coward!

All were lulled into a sense of security except Captai