“I’ve booked passages for Buenos Ayres,” he said, “for the tenth day from to-day. It will be nice for you, I thought, to be convalescent all over the boat. And I chose the best they had, a nice water-tight one——”
Ivor suddenly burst into laughter. Giggling, it was really. And he said:—
“Gerald, what fun we’ll have together in foreign parts!”
“In extremely foreign parts,” he added softly.
And they did. But they had to come back all too soon, hearing there was a war in Europe.
“I wonder what it’s all about, this war,” Ivor wondered on the boat coming home. “I don’t know much about war....”
“That,” said Trevor, “is exactly why people go to war. So it’s said....”
“War,” said Trevor dogmatically, “has got something to do with some one being frightened to death of some one else....”
“War,” he went on dogmatically, “is supposed to have something to do with the Dignity of People. But by substituting the less pleasing word Bowels for Dignity the same result of war will be obtained.” And he turned to Ivor with that jerky little grin of his. “We’ll inquire further into this here war, Ivor, when we land.”
But Trevor inquired no further; for one thing, he had too much sense to try to find the sense in any war; and for another, he didn’t have time. For Gerald Trevor, Colonel Trevor, was killed almost as soon as he set foot in France, in the slaughter of Neuve Chapelle in the spring of 1915. Dear, gay Gerald! There died a courtly gentleman. He had loved a few women and killed a few men. There died a gay and kind and courtly gentleman.... And in the winter of 1916, Ivor Marlay, by then deprived of almost every sense by the noisome dullness of war, was also deprived by a shell of his left arm, from the shoulder; whereupon there followed for Captain Marlay months of hideous and tearing pain.