"Fancy people going out and trying to slaughter one another on a day like this!" he cried, looking with pink-lidded eyes at the sparse trees and scanty shade amid the white flood of sunshine.
"Well, you'd go out, if you had the chance," I said.
"And hate it like Hell all the time!" he murmured reflectively, as he mechanically took a salute. "I've seen enough people in the casualty lists to realise that war is a dangerous occupation, Stornaway; and I've met enough fellows home on leave.... You know Jim Loring's gone, by the way?" His teeth grated together. "This—this is the very thing that my uncle Bertrand and I spent half-a-dozen years trying to avert! Well, I must be getting back to work. If this war's done nothing else, at least it's cured me of the conventional, twelve-to-three-with-two-hours-off-for-luncheon view of Government offices. With me it's nine-thirty to eight, six days' holiday in twelve months and about one week-end in three."
As I would not come into his office and waste his time there, we wasted it for a few moments more by the Cook monument. George tried to give me my bearings, interrupting himself to ask jerkily, "I suppose you've heard that Jack Summertown's dead? He was knocked out at the same time as your nephew. And Val Arden?..."
I had an additional tragedy in which Oakleigh did not share, for we were almost within sight of the house which poor Deryk Lancing had so proudly adorned: on such another day he had taken me over it, room by room; I had heard that he died on the very evening that war was declared, yet I suppose he only anticipated what would have come to anyone of his age in six months' time.
"I suppose you can't imagine what all this looks like to a man who's seeing it for the first time," I said. "All this drilling and training. How many of these fellows will come back, d'you suppose? And what are we going to get in return?"
He smiled wistfully.
"A lasting peace, I hope. It can never happen again, you know."
"I never thought it could happen this time," I said.
"Well, this is going to prove that war is a failure. Perhaps we needed the proof.... You'll find that after the war people will begin to do what we—you and Bertrand and I and a thousand more—tried to make them do before—remove the incentive to war and the means of making war. There must be a general disarmament, the military machine must be broken. You'll find that Germany will be a confederated republic within twelve months—we can never make peace while there's a Hohenzollern at large. You know, Stornaway, this war's given us the opportunity of healing the sore places of Europe, and there's only one way to do it; when the peace conference begins to sit, it has got to divide the world according to nationalities. Belgium and France will have to be cleaned up first of all, and after that we must let the world go as it wants to go. Alsace-Lorraine will return to France; you'll find north and south Germany separating; Poland must be reconstituted; Italy will get back the Trentino and Trieste, though, of course, that leaves Austria without a port.... But you'll find Austria-Hungary splitting into a thousand pieces as soon as you apply the principle of nationality. I'm not sure about Constantinople, but I'm inclined to give it to Russia.... It's worth some sacrifice to clean up the international anomalies of the world and to make an end of war."