war
was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with
some trivial orgie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that
shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on
something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the
dizziest height--the agony of man. And I knew that, compared to that,
this overwhelming tower was itself a triviality; it was a mere stalk
of stone which humanity could snap like a stick.

"I don't know why I have talked so much about this silly old
Waterworks Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous
background. It was that, certainly, a sombre and awful landscape,
against which our figures were relieved. But I think the real reason
was, that there was in my own mind so sharp a transition from the
tower of stone to the man of flesh. For what I saw first when I had
shaken off, as it were, the shadow of the tower, was a man, and a man
I knew.

"Lambert stood at the further corner of the street that curved round
the tower, his figure outlined in some degree by the beginning of
moonrise. He looked magnificent, a hero; but he looked something much
more interesting than that. He was, as it happened, in almost
precisely the same swaggering attitude in which he had stood nearly
fifteen years ago, when he swung his walking-stick and struck it into
the ground, and told me that all my subtlety was drivel. And, upon my
soul, I think he required more courage to say that than to fight as he
does now. For then he was fighting against something that was in the
ascendant, fashionable, and victorious. And now he is fighting (at the
risk of his life, no doubt) merely against something which is already
dead, which is impossible, futile; of which nothing has been more
impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into
contact with it. People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the
psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs. Then he was
attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is
attacking the interesting but totally extinguished Wayne.

"His name recalls me to the details of the scene. The facts were
these. A line of red halberdiers, headed by Wayne, were marching up
the street, close under the northern wall, which is, in fact, the
bottom of a sort of dyke or fortification of the Waterworks. Lambert
and his yellow West Kensingtons had that instant swept round the
corner and had shaken the Waynites h