their
opportunities that they never brought their innermost thoughts out on
the table and asked themselves point-blank: "Should I go? Why shouldn't
I?" And there were some who saw dimly--as the months slid by with air
raids and submarine sinkings and all the new, terrible devices of death
and destruction which transgressed the old usages of war--there were
some who were troubled without knowing why. There were men who hated
bloodshed, who hated violence, who wished to live and love and go their
ways in peace, but who began uneasily to question whether these things
they valued were of such high value after all.

And Wes Thompson was one of these. Deep in him his emotions were
stirring. The old tribal instinct--which sent a man forth to fight for
the tribe no matter the cause--was functioning under the layer of stuff
that civilization imposes on every man. His reason gainsaid these
stirrings, those instinctive urgings, but there was a stirring and it
troubled him. He did not desire to die in a trench, nor vanish in
fragments before a bursting shell, nor lie face to the stars in No Man's
Land with a bayonet hole in his middle. He would not risk these
fatalities for any such academic idea as saving the world for democracy.

Always when that queer, semi-dormant tribe instinct suggested that he go
fight with the tribe against the tribal enemy his reason swiftly choked
the impulse. He would not fight for a political abstraction. He had read
history. It is littered with broken treaties. If he fought it would be
because he felt there was need to strike a blow for something righteous.
And his faith in the righteousness of the Allied cause was still
unfired. He saw no mission to compel justice, to exact retribution, only
a clash of Great Powers, in which the common man was fed to the roaring
guns.

But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future. The
Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack. It might
be--remotely--that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting.
He saw that cloud on the horizon. Sometimes he wished that he could
muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war. He saw men who
had it and wondered privately how they came by it.

If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would
have settled certain matters out of hand. Chief among these would have
been the problem of Sophie Carr.

Sophie eluded and mystified him. Not wholly in a physical
sense--although