dliest views. Whether they really were his
views, or only a tortuous attempt at comfort, the sympathy underlying
their expression was undoubted and indubitable. But the doctor spoke as
though he meant every word, and the boy only longed to agree with him: his
conscientious failure to do so declared itself in a series of incoherent
expostulations to which Baumgartner himself gave articulate shape in order
to demolish them in the next breath.

"You say his life was as much to him as yours to you? Is that it, my
young fellow?"

Pocket acknowledged the interpretation, and watched the Turk's head
wreathed in cool blue clouds.

"You might as well compare withered weed with budding flower!" cried the
poetic doctor. "You have an honourable life before you; he had a
disreputable one behind him. You were bred and nurtured in the lap of
luxury; he finds it for the first time in his----"

But here even Baumgartner broke off abruptly. The boy was writhing in his
bed; the man sat down on the end of it.

"You do such poor devils a service," said he, "in sending them to a world
that cannot use them worse than this one. They are better under the
ground than lying on it drenched and drunk!"

"It was a human life," groaned the boy, shutting his eyes in pain.

"Human life!" cried Baumgartner, leaping to his feet, his huge shadow
guying him on the ceiling. "What is this human life, and who are you and
I, that we set such store by it? The great men of this world never did;
it's only the little people and the young who pule and whine about human
life. The ancient Roman sacrificed his weaklings as on an altar; there
are some of us in these days who would prescribe a Tarpeian Rock for
modern decadence. So much in pious parenthesis! Napoleon thought nothing
of your human life. Von Moltke, Bismarck, and our staff in Germany
thought as little of it as Napoleon; the Empire of my countrymen was
founded on a proper appreciation of the infinitesimal value of human life,
and your British Empire will be lost through exaggerating its importance.
Blood and Iron were our our watchwords; they're on the tip of every Fleet
Street pen to-day, but I speak of what I know. I've heard the Iron shriek
without ceasing, like the wind, and I've felt the Blood like spray from a
hot spring! I fought at Gravelotte; as a public schoolboy you probably
never heard the name before this minute. I fought in the Prussian Guard.
I saw you looking at the pic