"If I could get out to-morrow ...! Man, I know the drill from A to Z, I was under fire all through the Balkan Wars ... and your uncle, in the kindness of his heart, talks about interpreterships! My God!"
"He only wanted to preserve your precious young life," I said.
"You damned fool, d'you think I want my life preserved?" he blazed out, with such passion as I had not seen in his face since the first weeks that I knew him at Melton.
V
A recruiting campaign presents sorry studies in psychology. Easterly was the only ground I worked, but I imagine the Easterly types are to be found everywhere. There were hale, open-air men who enlisted because it was the obvious thing to do, over-age men who struggled to circumvent the doctor, and boys who rushed forward adventurous and unheeding as they would have rushed to a race-meeting or polar expedition.
Others reflected longer and advanced more slowly—men with domestic responsibilities who yet appreciated the gravity of what was at stake; men who were urged on by speeches or taunts; and again, and with pathetic impetuosity, boys whose fathers and brothers were already falling in the tragic glory of the Mons retreat.
Slower still came the self-conscious men who could never visualize themselves as soldiers, some so slowly that they never reached the booth. There was an almost articulate struggle of mind with those who had mounted socially until they affected contempt for mere privates and yet saw no likelihood of securing a commission; yet this was to some extent balanced by the readiness of others to sink in the social scale. Many a clerk, who had starved to preserve black-coated gentility, grasped the opportunity of abandoning pretension and a semi detached villa. "I'm comfortable—for the first time in my life," one of them told my uncle. And there was an appreciable minority of sons with excessive mothers, and husbands with too persistent wives, crowding to the Colours like schoolboys on holiday.
By the time that my canvass started in earnest, the cream had been skinned from the district. Lord Kitchener's magic name and the alarm of the great retreat had attracted the willing fighters, and we were left with some whose imagination was unstirred and others who frankly opposed our efforts. My first meeting was strongly reminiscent of old political wrangles in the Cranbourne Division. I was met at the doors of the National School by Kestrell, the secretary of the Easterly Democratic Union, who had habitually sat on my platform and moved votes of thanks when I discoursed on international disarmament. Some years earlier he had abandoned an assured livelihood to organize the hotter-headed section of labour in the town. Throughout the week he preached the General Strike and on Sundays performed the office of Reader in the conventicle of a microscopic sect. Frail and passionate, with excited gestures and the eyes of a fanatic, I always regarded him as a man who would burn or be burned with almost equal serenity.
"I'm surprised to see you here, Mr. Oakleigh," he remarked, with strong disapproval in his tones as he shook hands.
"I'm afraid we can't talk about the federation of Europe till we've won this war," I said.