"Russian aggression must be checked," said Harben. "Her ambition knows no bounds. We go hand-in-hand with France, of course."
"H'm! My own feeling would be that it is more for the aggrandisement of Louis Napoleon than for the checking of Russia that we are going to fight."
"Who's going to fight?" asked Lieutenant George, catching the word.
And then of course it was out. For, once more, whatever of misery and loss war entails upon others, to the fighting man in embryo it means only glory and the chances of promotion.
It was the following day that the disturbances nearer home began.
Jack lay awake most of the morning after he got to bed, thinking soberly, with rapturous intervals when Gracie's laughing face floated in the smaller darkness of his tired eyes, and envying Jim, who slept at intervals like a sheep-dog after a day on the hills. But at times even Jim's heavy breathing stopped and he lay quite still, and then he too was thinking--which was an unusual thing for him to do in the night--though not perhaps so deeply as Jack.
They both felt like boiled owls in the morning, and lay late. It was close on midday when Jack, after several pipes and a splitting yawn, said, "Let's go up along,"--which always meant north along the flats--"my blood's thickening." And they went off together along the hard-ribbed sand, with the sea and the sky like bars of lead on one side and the stark corpses of the sand-hills, with the wire-grass sticking up out of them like the quills of porcupines, on the other.
They walked a good two miles without a word, both thinking the same things and both fearing to start the ball rolling.
"We've got to talk it out, Jim," said Jack at last.
Jim grunted gloomily.