“Soldiers!” cried Jeremy, and paused to watch them go by.
“Yes, soldiers,” Roger murmured with a smile of good-natured contempt, trying to draw him along. But Jeremy’s curiosity had been aroused. He suddenly remembered, and then closed his lips on an enigmatical remark which the Speaker had made about guns; and he insisted on staying where he was until the regiment had gone out of sight. Their uniforms, an approximation to khaki, yet of a different shade, their rifles, clumsy and antiquated in appearance, their feet wrapped in rags and shod with rawhide sandals, combined with their shambling, half-ashamed, half-sulky carriage to give them the air of a parody on the infantry of the Great War.
“Whom do they fight?” he asked abstractedly, still standing and gazing after them.
“No one,” Roger answered, with the same expression of contemptuous tolerance. “They are good for nothing; there has been no war in England for a hundred years.”
“But are there no foreign wars?”
“None that concern us.” And Roger went on to explain in an uninterested and scrappy manner that there was always fighting somewhere on the Continent, that the Germans and the Russians and the Polish were forever at one another’s throats, that the Italians could not live at peace with one another or with their neighbors on the Adriatic, and that the peoples of Eastern Europe seemed bent on mutual extermination. “But we never interfere,” he said. “It isn’t our business, though sometimes the League tries to make out that it is. And we need no army. It’s a fad of the Speaker’s, though he could always get Canadians if he wanted them.”
“The League? Canadians?” Jeremy interjected.
“Yes; the Canadian bosses hire out armies when any one wants them. They do say that that ruffian who is staying with the Speaker came over for some such reason. But I can’t see why we should want Canadians.”
“But you said ... something ... the League?”
“Oh, the old League!” Roger answered carelessly. “Surely that existed in your time, didn’t it? I mean the League of Nations.” And, as Jeremy said nothing, he continued: “You know, they sit at Geneva and tell every one how to manage his own affairs. We take no notice of them, except that we send them a contribution every year. And I don’t know why we should do even that. The officials are always all Germans ... so close, you know....”