“I’m sorry. No, I’d rather not settle in Dorzheim for good. But we could go home by two separate routes.”
“Job enough to find one route, I should say. Stop ragging, Deb; this isn’t a joke.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured again, all womanhood abject before the gruff commonsense of all manhood.
“That idiot Koch ought to have warned us. He must have known something. We should have left here a week ago, when I suggested it.... If it’s going to be a general flare-up, then one jolly well wants to be in one’s own country, and not in somebody else’s!”
CHAPTER III
I
Patriotism, even more than bunting-deep, is largely a matter of habit. Before August, nineteen-fourteen, Richard had rather taken his country for granted. Now he awoke to an England that in return for years of security and a lazy pleasure at the sight of so many red patches on the school-map, suddenly exacted service—fighting service. Richard cursed his age; welcomed any indication in the trend of things “out there” that seemed to prophesy a minimum of three years’ activities. “If only the war holds out till I can get to it!” He suffered from disturbing premonitions of a peace signed and ratified just one day before his eighteenth birthday.
War, as a pastime, a profession, an emotional outlet, fulfilled every unspoken need of his temperament. He was a born pugilist; he did not mind bodily discomfort; he was endowed with splendid physique; he kept cool in emergencies; he had an infinite preference for male society; he was under a firm impression that he was devoid of that cumbersome burden called imagination; he lacked graceful accomplishments. What did the future hold for a boy of such capacities and disqualifications? Nineteen-fourteen came like an answer to an obstinate riddle.
And—confound it!—he was not yet sixteen.