bout that. He left the question with his admission
of its extreme complexity.

He went on to talk of the strange contrasts of war, of such things as
the indifference of the birds to gunfire and desolation. One day on
the Carso he had been near the newly captured Austrian trenches, and
suddenly from amidst a scattered mass of Austrian bodies a quail had
risen that had struck him as odd, and so too had the sight of a pack of
cards and a wine flask on some newly-made graves. The ordinary life was
a very _obstinate_ thing....

He talked of the courage of modern men. He was astonished at the
quickness with which they came to disregard shrapnel. And they were
so quietly enduring when they were wounded. He had seen a lot of the
wounded, and he had expected much groaning and crying out. But unless
a man is hit in the head and goes mad he does not groan or scream! They
are just brave. If you ask them how they feel it is always one of two
things: either they say quietly that they are very bad or else they say
there is nothing the matter....

He spoke as if these were mere chance observations, but everyone tells
me that nearly every day the king is at the front and often under fire.
He has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam War Lord has taken
since the war began. He keeps himself acutely informed upon every aspect
of the war. He was a little inclined to fatalism, he confessed. There
were two stories current of two families of four sons, in each three
had been killed and in each there was an attempt to put the fourth in a
place of comparative safety. In one case a general took the fourth
son in as an attendant and embarked upon a ship that was immediately
torpedoed; in the other the fourth son was killed by accident while he
was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From those stories we came
to the question whether the uneducated Italians were more superstitious
than the uneducated English; the king thought they were much less so.
That struck me as a novel idea. But then he thought that English rural
people believe in witches and fairies.

I have given enough of this talk to show the quality of this king of the
new dispensation. It was, you see, the sort of easy talk one might hear
from fine-minded people anywhere. When we had done talking he came
to the door of the study with me and shook hands and went back to his
desk--with that gesture of return to work which is very familiar and
sympathetic to a writer, and wit