HEN Sam got up and began to undress to take his bath, his head swam so that he was obliged to lie down again. He tried again two or three times, but always with the same result, and finally he rang for a servant and sent for an army surgeon. The doctor came at once, took his temperature with a thermometer, and, after examining him, pronounced that he had a bad attack of fever, probably typhoid. He advised him to go to the hospital, and before noon Sam found himself comfortably installed in a hospital bed, screened off by a movable partition from a ward of fever patients. The doctor's surmise proved to be correct, and for weeks he was dangerously ill, much of the time being delirious. He suffered once or twice also from relapses, and showed very little recuperative force when the fever finally left him. Meanwhile he was very low-spirited. The idea preyed upon his mind that he was no soldier and could never be one, and he felt that the resulting depression had a great deal to do with his protracted illness. Cleary was assiduous in his attentions, but, intimate as they were, Sam could never bring himself to confess his culpable weakness to him. As he became convalescent he had other visitors, and among them Mr. Cope, the inventor of explosives and artillery.
"I am at work at a great invention which I shall owe partly to you and partly to the Emperor," said he on one occasion. "Do you remember that at that execution the Emperor said that the perfect soldier has no conscience or reason?" Sam winced. "And then you called my attention to the fact that the men performed their part like machines. That set me thinking. I am always on the lookout for suggestions, and there was one ready-made. Do you see? Why shouldn't a machine be made to take the place of a soldier? A great idea, isn't it? Now you see we've already done something in that line. A torpedo is simply an iron soldier that swims under water and needs no breath, and does as he is told. Think how absurd it is in battle to have a field-battery come up under fire at a gallop! They swing round, unlimber, load, and fire, then harness again, swing round again, and off they are. Meanwhile perhaps half the men and horses have been killed. Wouldn't it be better to have the whole battery a machine, instead of only the guns? The general could stay behind out of range, as he does to-day, and direct the whole thing with an electric battery and a telescope. It is not a difficult matter when you once accept the principle, and the principle can be extended to cavalry and infantry just as well. It will be a great thing for the nations that are best at mechanics, and that means you and us."
"I don't see," said Sam, "how you can get on without the courage of brave men."
"Courage! Why, what is more courageous than a piece of steel? It wouldn't be easy to frighten it. And it is just so with all soldierly qualities. Do you want obedience? What is more obedient than a machine? I suppose you admit that a human soldier may disobey orders sometimes."
"Perhaps," said Sam, blushing uneasily.
"You may be sure that a steel soldier won't unless he is disabled, and a human soldier may be disabled too. Then the Emperor said a soldier should not reason. There's no danger of a steel soldier trying that.
"'Theirs not to reason why.
Theirs but to do and die.'
"Why, the Light Brigade at Balaklava won't be in it with them. And it's just the same with regard to conscience. A piece of steel has no conscience. What we want is a machine soldier. A soldier must be obedient, and he must be without fear, conscience, or a mind of his own. In all these respects a machine can surpass a man. Why, you yourself, in praising those Tutonian soldiers, said that they went like clockwork. That's the highest military praise possible."
Sam was much disturbed by this conversation. Mr. Cope went on to tell how his Government had spent £23,000 to fire a single shot and test one of his new projectiles, but Sam was not interested. Then the inventor began to rally him about the lack of interest of soldiers in the inventions which they used.
"If you had had to depend on yourselves for inventions," he said, "you would still be fighting with cross-bows, or perhaps more likely with your teeth and finger-nails. No soldier ever invented anything. We inventors are the real military men."