'Yes, yes,' he cried, 'but man-power is the final court of appeal, and we have been wasting our man-power, wasting it,—wasting it!'
'What do you mean by that? A finer lot of men never put on uniform than we had.'
'In a way you are right. No one could admire the heroism of our fellows more than I do. You have to get farther back.'
'How can we get farther back?'
'You have to get back to the Government. Look here, Luscombe,' and evidently he had forgotten the difference in our ranks, 'let me put the case into a nutshell. I was sent over here, to France, in a hurry. Never mind how I found out what I am going to tell you,—it is a fact. Two battalions of ours were urgently ordered here; our men here were hardly pressed, the Germans outnumbered us. Our chaps hadn't enough rest, and the slaughter was ghastly. So we were ordered over to relieve them, and the command was that we were to travel night and day, so urgent was the necessity.
'What happened? The boat by which I came was held up in the harbour for twenty-four hours. Why? I am not talking without my book,—I know, I have made investigations, and I will tell you why. The firemen were in public-houses, and would not come away. And the Government allowed those public-houses to be open; the Government allowed those firemen to drink until they were in an unfit condition to take us across. The Government allowed the stuff that robbed them of their manhood, and of their sense of responsibility, to be manufactured. The Government allowed private individuals to make fortunes out of that stuff! Just think of it! There we were, all waiting, but we could not go. Why could not we go? Why were we held up, when the lives of thousands of others depended upon us? when the success of the war probably depended upon it? Drink! there is your answer in one word.
'Here's this affair of the last two or three days; it didn't come off. Ammunition was wasted, men's lives were wasted, hearts were broken; but it didn't come off. Why was it?
'What are we fighting? We are fighting devilry, inhumanity, Prussian barbarism. Search your dictionary, and you can't find names too bad to describe what we are fighting. But in order to do it, we use one of the devil's chief weapons, which is robbing us of victory.
There was a strange intensity in his voice, and I think he forgot all about himself in what he said.
'Look here,' he went on, 'you remember how some time ago we were crying out for munitions. "Let us have more guns, more munitions," we said. The Germans, who had been preparing for war for so many years, had mountains of it, and as some one has said, thousands of our men were blown into bloody rags each day. And we could not answer back. We had neither guns nor shells. Why?'