But war finds few excuses; and there are strange minnows in the fishing-net. Sometimes, looking into the T.B. ward, I think: "It almost comes to this: one must spit blood or fight...."
"Why don't you refuse?" my friend would say to the dairyman. "Why should you fight because another man tells you to?"
It isn't so simple as that, is it, dairyman? It isn't even a question of the immense, vague machinery behind the sergeant, but just the sergeant himself; it isn't a question of generals or politicians of great wrongs or fierce beliefs ... but of the bugle which calls you in the morning and the bugle which puts you to bed at night.
Well, well.... The dairyman is in hospital, and that is the best that he can hope for.
I read a book once about a prison. They too, the prisoners, sought after the prison hospital, as one seeks after one's heaven.
It is so puffed up of my friend to think that his and his "movement's" are the only eyes to see the vision of horror. Why, these others are the vision!
This afternoon I was put at splints again.
I only had an inch or two to finish and I spun it out, very happy.
Presently the foot of a bed near me began to catch my attention: the toe beneath the sheets became more and more agitated, then the toes of the other foot joined the first foot, beating a frenzied tattoo beneath the coverings. I looked up.