I made no answer, for I was thinking of O'Rane. On New Year's Eve he had dined at home with George and Bertrand, and all three came up to my room afterwards. We made a despondent party, for the endlessness of the war daunted us as the third year added month to month with lengthening casualty lists and a growing sense that, when we had already failed so many times and in so many ways, there was no reason why we should not go on failing. Each one of us was far enough from reality to be conscious of helplessness and insufficiency; I could not count the number of times that Bertrand had growled, "I've done with the House! I'm not going down there any more. What good can we do?"—the number of times, too, that he repented and saw the House as the one independent and courageous check on an imbecile and malign government. Stripped of all mental elasticity and enthusiasm, George hated the Admiralty with a savage ferocity that was made no less by the easy youth which he had passed, uncontrolled, undisciplined and effortless. And underneath our nervous depression and irritability lay a despondent sense that the moral grandeur of the war had become obscured.
"I suppose the pace was too hot," George observed gloomily. "But in those first weeks.... They may not have known what they were going out to face, but they went like good 'uns; and the people who stayed behind were ready for any sort of sacrifice of money, comfort, leisure. All the spiritual fervour seems to go now in trying to make other people do things, keeping other people up to the mark.... God! I'm sick of the press agitations, I'm sick of all this political intrigue, I suppose I'm sick of the war."
O'Rane nodded, but made no answer.
"I don't ask anyone to listen to me," George went on with unwonted bitterness, "because I've been wrong all through. So have you, Bertrand. We were wrong before the war, when we said there couldn't be a war; and we were wrong when we started yapping about a 'war to end war.' We can't even make a clean job of this, we can't make the Hun put up his hands and say he'll go back to the status quo, and as for dismembering Germany and deposing the Kaiser—we can't do it! But when I remember my own tom-fool speeches at the beginning——"
"But we couldn't keep out of it, George," O'Rane interjected.
"And precious little good we've done by going in. I suppose we have stopped Germany from dominating Europe, but, as for our own honour, we offered that up on the altar of necessity when we found that we were fighting a nation that meant to win if it darned well could. Our later policy's become frankly imperialistic; there's no ethical connection between Belgian neutrality and the partition of Turkey and Austria. I'm afraid I've taken a deuced long time to see it...." He turned to me with a scornful smile. "Do you remember when you first came back to England? When we met outside the Admiralty?"
"I've often thought of that conversation," I said.
"Everything seemed to follow so naturally in those days," he sighed. "Disarmament, nationality, a tribunal to arbitrate between states. Raney, you were one of the most persistent optimists I've had the ill-luck to meet; you're not going to pretend that the entire thing's not the most futile, gigantic waste ... whole peoples in arms hacking themselves to death and not a damned thing gained! You don't think we're going to win this war?"
For the first time in six months I saw O'Rane roused to impersonal interest.
"I don't know if anybody's going to win," he answered. "And, what's more, I don't greatly care."