War is horrible!" said Mary, shuddering.

"Oh, no!" cried James, shaking himself out of his despondency. "War is
the most splendid thing in the world. I shall never forget those few
minutes, now and then, when we got on top of the Boers and fought with
them, man to man, in the old way. Ah, life seemed worth living then! One
day, I remember, they'd been giving it us awfully hot all the morning,
and we'd lost frightfully. At last we rushed their position, and, by
Jove, we let 'em have it! How we did hate them! You should have heard
the Tommies cursing as they killed! I shall never forget the
exhilaration of it, the joy of thinking that we were getting our own
again. By Gad, it beat cock-fighting!"

Jamie's cheeks were flushed and his eyes shone; but he had forgotten
where he was, and his father's voice came to him through a mist of blood
and a roar of sound.

"I have fought, too," said Colonel Parsons, looking at his son with
troubled eyes--"I have fought, too, but never with anger in my heart,
nor lust of vengeance. I hope I did my duty, but I never forgot that my
enemy was a fellow-creature. I never felt joy at killing, but pain and
grief. War is inevitable, but it is horrible, horrible! It is only the
righteous cause that can excuse it; and then it must be tempered with
mercy and forgiveness."

"Cause? Every cause is righteous. I can think of no war in which right
has not been fairly equal on both sides; in every question there is
about as much to be said on either part, and in none more than in war.
Each country is necessarily convinced of the justice of its own cause."

"They can't both be right."

"Oh, yes, they can. It's generally six to one and half a dozen of the
other."

"Do you mean to say that you, a military man, think the Boers were
justified?" asked Colonel Clibborn, with some indignation.

James laughed.

"You must remember that if any nation but ourselves had been engaged,
our sympathies would have been entirely with the sturdy peasants
fighting for their independence. The two great powers in the affairs of
the world are sentiment and self-interest. The Boers are the smaller,
weaker nation, and they have been beaten; it is only natural that
sympathy should be with them. It was with the French for the same
reason, after the Franco-Prussian War. But we, who were fighting,
couldn't think of sentiment; to us it was really a matter of life and
death, I was interested to see how soon the English put