He looked round at us—and this is what I'll never forget—not if I live till my dying day:
"The glories of war!" he says over. "The glories of war! You do not know what you say! I tell you that I have seen mad dogs, mad beasts of prey—but I do not know what it is they do. The glories of war! Oh, my God, does nobody know that we are all mad together?"
Jeffro's wife tried to quiet him, but he shook her off.
"Listen," he said. "I have gone to war and lived through hell to learn one thing. I gif it to you: Life is something else than what we think it is. That is true. Life is something else than what we think it is. When we find it out, we shall stop this devil's madness."
Just then a little cry came from somewhere over back in the road.
"My papa! It is my papa!" it said. And there came running Joseph, that had heard his father's voice, and that we had forgot' all about. We let him through the crowd, and he climbed up in the car, and his father took him in his one arm. And there they sat, with the globe that Joseph carried, the world that he carried, in beside them.
We all began moving back to the village, before much of anybody knew it—the automobile with Jeffro in it, and Jeffro's wife, and Jeffro's little boy. And with the car went, not soldiers, not flags, not the singing of any one nation's airs—but the children, with those symbols of the life that is living and building life—as fast as we'll let it build. Jeffro didn't know what they were, I guess—though he knew the love and the kindliness and the peace of the time. But I knew, and more of us knew, that in that hour lay all the promise of the new day, when we understand what we are: Gods, fallen into a pit.
We went up the street with the children singing:
"Don't you wish we all could be
What we know we are,