it? Lie still and be quiet!"

"I can't be quiet. Like a damned big monster, yellin' for boys to eat.
Has he any childher, will you tell me?..."

"I don't know, father!"

"Of course he hasn't. An' here he is, yelpin' in his damned rag every
day, 'Fee-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a young man!' Why don't they
shove him at the Front ... the very front!"

"You must keep quiet, father!"

"All right, Henry, all right!"

He was silent for a few minutes, and then he began again, in a quieter
voice. "I'd have put the men that made it, the whole lot of them, in the
front rank, and let them blow themselves to blazes. Old men sittin' in
offices, an' makin' wars, an' then biddin' young men to pay the price of
them! By God, that's mean! By God, that's low!..."

"But old men couldn't bear the strain of it, father!" Henry interjected,
and he recalled some of the horrors of the trenches where the soldiers
had stood with the water reaching to their waists; but Mr. Quinn
insisted that the old men should have fought the war they made.

"Who cares a damn whether they can bear it or not," he said. "Let 'em
die, damn 'em! They're no good!" He turned quickly to Henry, and
demanded, "What good are they? Tell me that now!" but before Henry could
make an answer to him, he went off insistently, "They're no good, I tell
you. I know well what they're like ... sittin' in their clubs, yappin'
an' yappin' an' demandin' this an' demandin' that, an' gettin' on one
another's nerves; an' whatever happens it's not them that suffers for
it: it's the young lads that pays for everything. Look at the way the
old fellows go on in Parliament, Henry! By God, I want to vomit when I
read about them! Yappin' an' yappin' when they should be down on their
knees beggin' God's forgiveness...."

He spoke as if he were not himself an old man, and it did not seem
strange to Henry that he should speak in that fashion, for Mr. Quinn's
spirit had always been a young spirit.

"An' these wee bitches with their white feathers," he went on, "ought to
be well skelped. If I had a daughter, an' she did a thing like that, by
God, I'd break her skull for her!"

"I suppose they think they're doing their duty, father, and they're
young!..."

"There's women at it, too. I read in the paper yesterday mornin' that
there was grown women doin' it. There's nobody has any right to bid a
man go to that except them that's been to it themselves. If the women
an' the parsons an' the o