ersensitive British, make the greatest mistake. Everything in war is
fair. Get the war over, say I, even if it comes to smashing up the
enemy's hospitals. The wounded, nowadays, are getting well too quickly.
There's a fellow in that battery yonder who has been in the hospital
twice already, and, if this war lasts out Kitchener's tip of three
years, practically the whole of the armies will have gone up for
alterations and repairs, and be as lively as ever on the firing line.
The Geneva Treaty, that prohibits firing on the Red Cross in time of
war, is like any other 'scrap of paper.' I'd wipe out the enemy's
hospitals and poison his food supplies. It's an uncivilised idea, I
guess, but so is war. What's the difference between tearing out a
fellow's 'innards' with a bayonet, and killing him by the gentler way of
poisoning his liquor? What's the difference between poisoning the
enemy's drinking water and poisoning the enemy's air with the
new-fangled French explosive--Turpinite? It's all hot air talking of the
enemy's barbarism--scratch the veneer off any of us and we're back into
the stone age. If I had a free leg or free wing, I'd drop arsenic in
every reservoir in Germany. Why, we're even prevented dropping 'coughs'
on those long strings of trains we see every day, crawling far beyond
the enemy's line carrying supplies from their bases to the firing line,
feeding 'em up, feeding 'em up all the time."

We chafed at this restriction of our possibilities.

It gave Nap a fine opportunity for nasty remarks.

"Here we've got the most wonderful arm of the war, and the men over us
don't know how to appreciate it. It's the same old prejudices, as my old
Colonel, Sam Reber, used to say, 'every new thing has to fight its way.'
It's the same with wireless. Here they're only using it for tiddly
widdly messages, like school kids practising with pickle bottles, when
they could use it to guide a balloon loaded with explosives and fitted
up with a wireless receiver and a charged cell, so that it could be
exploded by a wave when it got over a position or a city. I'd like to
see this fight a war of cute stunts, a battle of brains against brains,
but I suppose we'll have to stick here till our fabrics rot whilst those
fellows out yonder are burrowing into the earth like moles, coming out
at night, like cave-men, and battling with a club."

CHAPTER VII.

What Australia was Doing.

That day I had a letter from Australia. Here it