“What is it then, dear?”
“Deb, d’you know why England and Germany are fighting? Such a silly reason!—to find out if Goethe or Shakespeare was the greatest. Lothar said so.”
“We’re fighting to keep England a free country,” Deb spoke clearly and simply as to a child ... her young brother was even less than a child in his shaken hysterical outpourings.
“Are we? I’ve been thinking too much, thinking all the time, and all round.... I want to stop thinking, but I don’t know where to begin to stop, or why I ever started to think.... Something happened to Gottlieb Schnabel and he screamed—but it was quite right, Deb, he was a German; he shouldn’t have left Germany; perhaps his father brought him here and didn’t have him naturalized; if he’d stopped over there he might have fought for his country—tho’ he’d have been a rotten fighter. Anyway, the Germans wouldn’t have him now. They wouldn’t have me.”
“But even if—you’d never——?... Richard!”
He was silent, too tired to attempt to tell her of all the bludgeonings his spirit had received since that evening in the May of 1915. “But I’d still knock down the fellow who hinted that I cared a curse for any country except England ... England....”
But England had informed him fifty times a day, and by fifty different methods, subtle and brutal, that she had no need of him, no use for him, preferred to do without him, doubted and despised him.... Loyalty crept shivering into a corner at last ... loyalty was apathetic, numb——
“What’s the good? It just has to be like this. They’d persecute me in Germany for being English, worse than in England for being German. And the neutral countries are all getting sucked in one side or the other.... I thought once we could all go to America. What’s the good! everybody’s fighting for something they believe in! everybody’s got their back to the wall ... there’s not even a wall for us; only dropping spaces.... No Man’s Land.... I dream of it when I fall asleep—nowhere to go—and reeling pushes from all sides—you spin round and round, and your brain spins round and round—nowhere to go and nowhere to rest—for Thomas Spalding and me.... You hope it’s going to end, but it doesn’t, and they hate us worse every day ... they hate us worse than they hate the real Germans.... I don’t know why, I don’t know what we’ve done—except perhaps that we’re here and near at hand; it’s more fun to hate something that’s near, isn’t it? We hang on and try to prove that we’re loyal and all right ... the hate seems to be receding ... and then something happens—and naturally it all rolls up again. Deb, it’s a double treachery when one of our lot betrays England to Germany—they betray us to England at the same time ... and you can see the pink heads bobbing....”
“The war will be over one day.”
The boy lifted his face; showed her the eyes of a fighter crucified to inaction: