ican hysteria during the war with Spain, whose weaker cause, true to
his earliest inclinations, he had been compelled to champion. And now
when the tide was turning in England's favour, when every other boy came
to school wearing a khaki tie quartered with blue or red and some of
them even came tricked out with Union Jack waistcoats, when the wearing
of a British general's head on a button and the hissing of Kruger's name
at a pantomime were signs of high emotion, when many wastrels of his
acquaintance had uniforms, and when the patriotism of their friends
consisted of making these undignified supernumeraries drunk, Michael
began to wonder whether war conducted by a democracy had ever been much
more than a circus for the populace.

And when one bleak morning in early spring he read in a fatal column
that Captain Kenneth Ross had been killed in action, his smouldering
resentment blazed out, and as he hurried to school with sickened heart
and eyes in a mist of welling tears, he could have cursed everyone of
the rosetted patriots for whose vainglory such a death paid the price.
Alan, as he expected, was not at school, and Michael spent a restless,
miserable morning. He hated the idea of discussing the news with his
friends of the hot-water pipes, and when one by one the unimaginative,
flaccid comments flowed easily forth upon an event that was too great
for them even to hear, much less to speak of, Michael's rage burst
forth:

"For God's sake, you asses, don't talk so much. I'm sick of this war.
I'm sick of reading that a lot of decent chaps have died for nothing,
because it is for nothing, if this country is never again going to be
able to stand defeat or victory. War isn't anything to admire in itself.
All the good of war is what it makes of the people who fight, and what
it makes of the people who stay at home."

The Olympians roared with laughter, and congratulated Michael on his
humorous oration.

"Can't you see that I'm serious? that it is important to be gentlemen?"
Michael shouted.

"Who says we aren't gentlemen?" demanded a very vapid, but slightly
bellicose hero.

"Nobody says _you_ aren't a gentleman, you ass; at least nobody says you
eat peas with a knife, but, my God, if you think it's decent to wear
that damned awful button in your coat when fellows are being killed
every day for you, for your pleasure, for your profit, for your
existence, all I can say is I don't."

Michael felt that the climax of t