those about him.

At the conclusion of the letter he put it down, and crossing to the
French windows, leaned against them, while his fingers drummed
nervously on the glass. With a gesture of impatience, as though he
resented its having been written at all, he picked up the letter once
more, and turning the pages, quickly reached the part which had
affected him so:

'They tell me I'm going to lose my arm, and that I'm out of it; but
they're wrong. I'm going back to America just as soon as they will let
me, and I'm going to tell them at home what this war is about. And,
what's more, I'm going to tell them what war is. It isn't great armies
moving wonderfully forward "as if on parade," as some of these
newspaper fellows tell you. It's a putrid, rotten business. After
Loos dead men and horses rotted for days in the sun. War's not a thing
of glory; it's rats and vermin and filth and murder. Three weeks ago I
killed a German. He hadn't a chance to get his gun up before I stuck
him with my bayonet like a pig. As he fell his helmet rolled off; he
was about eighteen, with sort of golden hair, and light, light blue
eyes. I've been through some hell, Austin, but when I saw his face I
cried like a kid. To you that's another argument for our remaining
neutral. To me that poor little Fritzie is the very reason America
should have been in it from the first. Can't you see that this
Prussian outfit is not only murdering Frenchmen and Russians and
Britishers, but is murdering her own men as well? If America had been
in the war it would have been over now, and every day she holds back
means so many more of the best men in the world dead.

'For the love of Mike, Austin, clear your brains. I have seen your
stuff in American papers sent over to me, and it's vile rot. Tomorrow
they're going to take my left arm from me, but'----

Selwyn crumpled the letter in his hand and hurled it into the
fireplace. Plunging his hands into his pockets, he paced the room as
he had done that night when Watson had called to tell him he was going
to enlist. He was seized with an incoherent fury at it all--the
inhumanity of it--the degradation of the whole thing. But through the
formless cloud of his thoughts there gleamed the one incessant phrase
'about eighteen, with sort of golden hair, and light, light blue eyes.'
Why should that groove his consciousness so deeply? He had heard,
unmoved, of the death of Malcolm Durwent. A month a