Those children who are too young yet to be able to kill birds are not forgotten. They are given prizes, which they take home to their proud parents, for the greatest number of flies they can kill.
When I was a boy, in the cruel bad times, I was told I would go to a very unpleasant place when I died if I was so wicked and cruel as to kill flies or pull their wings and legs off whilst they were alive.
I understand this game of pulling wings and legs off is also now played by boys with young birds taken out of nests.
How otherwise can two boys fairly divide a nestful of young birds if they are of an uneven number?
I was at a village fête where such prizes were given and I expressed surprise that a boy did not get first prize for a very big heap of dead flies. I was told that he had collected the dead flies found on the window ledges the previous autumn, and added them to his heap of kills, so he was not eligible.
It is praiseworthy to kill flies, but wrong to collect those already dead.
I must apologize for this long digression, but it was necessary in order that my following analysis of what is conventionally right and wrong might be properly understood.
As right and wrong at present stand, a man in uniform, if he meets a man in a different uniform (a man, with whom he has no quarrel, and of whose existence he was ignorant up to that moment), and he is told to fight that man, and kills him, he becomes a hero. The more he kills, the greater hero he is.
If on the other hand, this man in uniform quarrels with a man in the same uniform as himself, or who is in civilian dress, or if he is himself in civilian dress, and if, as the result of this quarrel they fight (even if a fair fight, with friends of each man present to see that it is a fair fight) and he kills the man, then he is a murderer.
A murderer must be murdered; that is his punishment for murdering a man.