How had she looked? had she brown or fair hair?—but all hair is the same in the water ... dank seaweed round a discoloured pulp....
“Swine! Swine!”—he was pacing again with rapid, demented step. “That’s not the game as it should be played, as it was arranged to be played. It’s a breach of the rules. Women and children and non-combatants excluded, and every man with a chance of self-defence. The conventions of war——”
And suddenly Richard stood still and began to laugh. And what chance of defence had a man standing beside a bursting bomb thrown by an unseen hand from fifty yards away? Little silly, fretful rules—with death and destruction and decay streaming wide over one country after another; whirring in the very air above God’s churches; throbbing in the sea under the millionaire’s pleasure-ship; each individual helplessly involved with their bodies or with their goods or with their hearts. Then, what the devil is the use of some abstract gabble about the conventions of a game? ... All that was for five hundred years ago, when one soldier had it out with another soldier according to the laws of chivalry. But in this wholesale welter.... All that fuss about two or three isolated lives sacrificed against the rules, as compared to the thousands according to rule; agony outside the rules, and agony according to rule. When it comes to it, what’s the difference? Ludicrous to reason in the old way—the ravings of an idiot; we have ramped so far round in the circle of civilization that we are miles behind again....
Richard did not attempt to turn his feverish, dishevelled reflections into coherence; but he could not force his mind from fastening with this queer new tenacity on aspects to which, until now, it had been muffled to a remote indifference. The war and all its immense and tendril complexities—how could he ever have viewed it just as a matter of dealing blows?
“It’s because I was to have had an active part in it. I was going to join up. The only way to avoid war-horror is to take part in it. What will it look like from the internment camp?——”
Imagination pierced—and recoiled from the threatened nausea of stagnation. Internment ... why, he and Deb had joked about it (“Yes, Deb’s all right; I’m glad Deb’s all right!”)—Concentration camps; potted Germans—“Did you know, Richard, Gustav Fürth was potted yesterday?” ... Jokes!—What were they like, these camps? the prisoners were well-treated, he had heard; but what did you do? ... Vision of two fattish young Teutons sleepy over their game of dominoes. This for him, while out there, out there, was the scrum and the sacrifice. This for Richard, who was a fighter ... “Oh God! let the war be over before I’m eighteen!”