“Well, I’ll try to make it clear to you. When I started soldiering, it was with the idea that I’d make it a life work. I had my dreams, even when I was a degraded outcast in the Legion. I pursued ’em. They were high dreams, too. They are right in suspecting me of that.
“For a good many years it looked as though they might be dreams that I could realize. I’m a good soldier, if I do say it myself. I was coming along nicely, in spite of the handicap of having come from the dregs of Sidi-bel-Abbes up among the gold stripes. And I came along faster when the war gave me an opportunity to show what I could do. But, unfortunately for me, it also presented to me certain things neither I nor any other man could do.
“You can’t wield armies like a personal weapon when the armies are nations and counted in millions. You can’t build empires out of the levy en masse. You can’t, above all, seize the imagination of armies and nations by victories, sway the opinions of a race, rise to Napoleonic heights, unless you can get advertising—and nowadays a kid aviator who downs his fifth enemy plane gets columns of it while nobody 38 knows who commands an army corps outside the general staff—and nobody cares!
“Where do you get off under those circumstances? I’ll tell you. You get a decoration or two, temporary rank, mention in the Gazette—and regretful demotion to your previous rank when the war is over.
“War, Mr. Doolittle, isn’t half the hell that peace is—to a fellow like me. Peace means the chance to eat my heart out in idleness; to grow fat and gray and stupid; to—oh! what’s the use! It means I’m through—through at forty, when I ought to be rounding into the dash for the final heights of success.
“That’s what’s the trouble with me. I’m through, Mr. Doolittle; and I know it. That’s why I look like this. That’s why money means nothing to me. I don’t need it. Once I was a cow-puncher, and then I became a soldier and finally a general. Those are the things I know, and the things I am fit for, and money is not necessary to any of them.
“So I’m through as a soldier, and I have nothing to turn back to—except punching cows. It’s a comedown, Mr. Doolittle, that you’d find it hard to realize. But I realize it, you bet—and that’s why I prefer to feel sort of low-down, and reckless and don’t-give-a-damnish—like any other cow hand that’s approaching middle age with no future in front of him. That’s why I’m taking to drink after twenty years 39 of French temperance. The Yankees say a man may be down but he’s never out. They’re wrong. I’m down—and I’m out! Out of humor, out of employment, out of ambition, out of everything.”
“That, if you will pardon me, general, is ridiculous in your case,” remonstrated the banker. “What if you have decided to leave the army—which is your intention, I take it? There is much that a man of wealth may accomplish; much that you may interest yourself in.”
De Launay shook a weary head.
“You don’t get me,” he asserted. “I’m burned out. I’ve given the best of me to this business—and I’ve realized that I gave it for nothing. I’ve spent myself—put my very soul into it—lived for it—and now I find that I couldn’t ever have accomplished my ambition, even if I’d been generalissimo itself, because such ambitions aren’t realized to-day. I was born fifty years too late.”