Fritz was pretty bad in
spots, all right. Maybe they just wanted to put the fear of God in their
hearts. A pal of mine in Flanders told me of a woman--in a place they
took by a night raid--she had her breast slashed open. She said a Boche
officer did it with his sword."

The man spoke of these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one
who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak
of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no
special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once.
But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war,
without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when
Thompson ceased to question him he ceased to talk.

But in Thompson these calmly recounted horrors worked profound distress.
His imagination became immediately shot with sinister pictures. All
these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved,
now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which
the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there
rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in
the cockpit beside this veteran of Flanders.

The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside.
Thompson sat silent beside him. But there was in Thompson none of the
other's passivity. Unlike the returned soldier, who had seen blood and
death until he was surfeited with it, until he wanted nothing but peace
and quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and
shell-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill
and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a
passionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man
or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no
fit name for such deeds.

And, responding so surely to that unexpected stimulus, he had no
stomach for crossing the Inlet as Tommy's guest, to view the scene of
Tommy's industrial triumph-to-be. He wasn't interested in that now.

Sitting under the awning, brooding over these things, he remembered how
Sophie Carr had reacted to the story of the Belgian refugee that
afternoon a year and a half ago. He understood at last. He divined how
Sophie felt that day. And he had blandly discounted those things. He had
gone about his individual concerns insulated against any call to right
wrongs, to fight oppression,