His sudden blaze of anger seemed to dab two spots of scarlet on his shining, prominent cheek-bones.
"For you—no good!" he cried. "I told those fools not to fight, I asked them what they were fighting for! They didn't know. How should they? But you know. Keep the dogs fighting one another, and they won't turn on you. But when your troops come back, the troops that you have drilled and taught to shoot, when they ask why their companions were killed——"
The girl relaxed the scornful attitude of aloofness, which she had preserved throughout the evening, to touch his arm warningly; he coughed and went back to his cigarette.
I laughed at him, partly because it was good for him and partly to help me keep my own temper.
"That stuff didn't go down the other night, and it won't go down with me. You've been talking quite sensibly so far——" He bowed ironically. "You can't make war without killing people, and there would have been no peace or safety, if we'd stood out. Of course, if you want to see this country or Russia treated as Belgium has been treated——"
He snorted contemptuously and told me, as an eye-witness, that the Belgian atrocities could at their worst always be matched by the Russian atrocities in East Prussia. ("Alone of the beasts man delights in torturing his fellows.") But why strain at the gnat and swallow the camel? The major atrocity was war; and, the greater the war, the greater the atrocity. "The English were not too humane in South Africa. No. And South Africa was child's play, it didn't matter who won. You were less humane still in putting down the Indian Mutiny, where you were fighting for our lives. Germany is fighting for her life, she must fight how she can. A screen of women and children before the advancing armies? One husbands one's troops. The Zeppelin attacks? One always likes to undermine civilian moral, to make the whimperers at home yelp for peace on one's own terms—(and are not you high-minded English warring on civilians—women and children, too—by blockading Germany?). This is a war of nations with all the nations' human and material resources poured into the scale. If you want to fight, fight to win! Sink your hospital ships! They will have to be replaced, and fewer troops, less food, less ammunition will be carried in consequence."
He threw himself back exhausted and gave way to a fit of coughing which threatened to tear him in pieces. I looked at my watch and got up to go.
"You should have preached this before the war," I suggested.
"It will be before the next war," he gasped. "And war there will be! I'm sick of this 'war-to-end-war' claptrap! That's been thought in every war, it was thought when Europe was leagued against Napoleon, as it is now leagued against the Kaiser! There will be war until the fools I addressed that night, those dogs who fight for the masters that betray them, turn and tear their masters limb from limb. Yes. If they don't do that before the world is ripe for another vintage, if they wait till present memories have faded and another generation of old men sits in power to send young men to their death——"
His pity again became merged in imaginative blood-lust until he seemed to revel in the horror of his own description. Science was to be applied without mercy or discrimination. When the maximum of destruction had been effected in the field, the war would be carried behind the lines to those who made its continuance possible. There would be no quarter for prisoners, who might escape, nor for the wounded, who might recover and fight again. The nurses and doctors who dragged the wounded back to life and patched them into the semblance of men were making new soldiers; it was not convenient that the enemy should be presented with new soldiers, so the war must be continued against these nurses and doctors. And against the countrymen, who raised food for the troops, and the artificers, who supplied them with arms, and the women, who came to take men's places on the farm and in the workshop, and the old men, who lent money to buy more guns and shells, and the young boys, who day by day drew nearer to the age when they, too, would be soldiers, and the last woman in the country, who, if she did nothing else, could bear a child to the last man....