It happened at that moment that the girls had gone into the house, and had not heard the conversation, but the half-dozen young men who were there looked at Bob as though he were a kind of reptile.
"I say, Bob," said Dick Tresize, who had been always his close friend, "you can't mean it! You are joking. Have—have you read the papers? Have you read what led up to our being in it? Have you seen the white paper?"
"Yes, I've read everything."
"Then you must know that the war is right."
"No war is right," was Bob's answer. "It's opposed to every law, human and divine. How can a fellow who is trying to be a—a Christian," his voice trembled as he spoke, "deliberately enlist for the purpose of killing his fellow-man? If I have a quarrel with a man, and I murder him, I am guilty of the most terrible deed a man can be guilty of. If I did it, I should be branded with the mark of Cain, and you would shudder at the mention of my name. A nation is a combination of individuals, and if nations in order to settle their quarrel go to war, and murder, not by ones, but by thousands, does it cease to be the crime of Cain? Does it cease to be murder?"
"Yes, of course it does," replied a young fellow, named Poldhu, who had arranged to leave for his regiment on the following morning.
"How?"
Poldhu was silent for a moment, then he cried out, "Is a hangman a murderer, for hanging a devil? Is a judge a murderer for condemning a fellow like Crippen to death?"
"And you mean to say you are going to funk it?" There was something ominous in Dick Tresize's voice.
"I am not going to enlist."