his poor victim of the war he had helped to make. "Poor lad!" he
said, "poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to death! Do look at
the quiet beauty of that face, that body--to be flung aside like
this!"

(I remember that near this dead man's hand a stranded star-fish
writhed its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea.
It left grooved traces in the sand.)

"There must be no more of this," panted Melmount, leaning on my
shoulder, "no more of this. . . ."

But most I recall Melmount as he talked a little later, sitting upon
a great chalk boulder with the sunlight on his big, perspiration-dewed
face. He made his resolves. "We must end war," he said, in that
full whisper of his; "it is stupidity. With so many people able
to read and think--even as it is--there is no need of anything of
the sort. Gods! What have we rulers been at? . . . Drowsing like
people in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward
each other for any one to get up and open the window. What haven't
we been at?"

A great powerful figure he sits there still in my memory, perplexed
and astonished at himself and all things. "We must change all this,"
he repeated, and threw out his broad hands in a powerful gesture
against the sea and sky. "We have done so weakly--Heaven alone
knows why!" I can see him now, queer giant that he looked on that
dawnlit beach of splendor, the sea birds flying about us and that
crumpled death hard by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless
heat of the unawakened powers of the former time. I remember it
as an integral part of that picture that far away across the sandy
stretches one of those white estate boards I have described, stuck
up a little askew amidst the yellow-green turf upon the crest of
the low cliffs.

He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things. "Has it ever
dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness--the pettiness!--of every
soul concerned in a declaration of war?" he asked. He went on,
as though speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe
Laycock, who first gave the horror words at the cabinet council,
"an undersized Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of
Greek--the sort of little fool who is brought up on the
admiration of his elder sisters. . . .

"All the time almost," he said, "I was watching him--thinking what
an ass he was to be trusted with men's lives. . . . I might have
done better to have thought that of myself. I was doing nothing
to pr