"We've been very lucky," Rod said quietly. "If I'd known the situation was so critical at sea, I shouldn't have let you come home when you did. The place you had in Chelsea—I went out to see it before I left—for old times' sake. I hadn't been there since you came home. There's a new house—at least, the upper story's all new. I made inquiries. A Gotha dropped high explosives on it about six weeks after you left."
Mary shuddered.
"Well, it's over," she murmured. "I cried all Armistice night—after the joy-whoopings. Silly thing for me to do. Everybody here went mad. Where were you?"
"Mopping up," he said grimly. "We didn't believe it at first. Then we sat down and smoked cigarettes and drank tea, and wondered how soon we could get home. God damn the war—and the war-makers!"
His voice choked with passion.
"Ss-sh, Rod!" she warned, and drew him out of the room, back to a chair by the fire.
"I can't help it. That's the way I feel," he broke out again. "And I feel that way like other men who've been through the big show, because of the things we saw done and had to do ourselves. The beastliness—the uselessness of it! And you don't realize the uselessness of it until you come back into civil life and notice the glib way people think and talk about it all; what the papers print, and the preachers preach, and politicians cooking up their little messes, and a group of white-whiskered old men at Versailles politely quarreling over the distribution of the plunder. Only there isn't going to be much plunder. They can't realize that. And they go on threatening and haranguing and wrangling over coal and iron and oil and indemnities, as if that was what we fought for. If it had been—I wonder if it was? When I feel that it was I have to curse.
"I'm home," he put his face in his hands, "but I know so many that won't come—good fellows—lots of 'em just kids—the pick of the bunch—Phil, and Bill Fraser and Dan Hale—dozens of fellows I went to school with—scores out of my own company. People prattle about the supreme sacrifice, as if that were a reward in itself. Damn them, they don't know what it means. I'm sick of all the saccharine tosh I hear about the war. It may have been necessary, and necessary jobs have to be done. But if the war-glorifiers at home were taken out and given a sniff of gas and a dose of cooties, and left lying about here and there for a few hours with part of one leg blown off, they might change their minds about the soul-uplifting part of it."
He lay back in his chair, eyes smoldering, fingers locked together for a minute. Then he smiled wanly.
"Listen to me rave," he said. "You mustn't mind. I get that way now and then. You do, in the army. You have to bottle up so much. I am glad the row's over, and I'm glad to be here, and I'd like to go up to the Hiding Place with you and the kid and camp out till I forgot I ever was in a war. I expect in time it will get hazy. Only I have spells of thinking that Andy Hall was right. I wonder what became of Andy."