As he talked a flush came into his face. He gathered speed, while he
spoke, till his words came with a rush, as if he were relieving himself
of inner pain.

"Have you ever heard the true inside account of an Arctic expedition?"
he went on. "There's a handful of men locked up inside a little ship for
thirteen or fourteen months. Nothing to look out on but snow and ice,
one color and a horizonful of it. Nothing to dream of but arriving at a
Pole--and that is a theoretical point in infinite space. There's no such
thing. The midnight sun and the frozen stuff get on their nerves--same
old sun in the same old place, same kind of weather. What happens? The
natural thing, of course. They get so they hate each other like poison.
They go around with a mad on. They carry hate against the commander and
the cook and the fellow whose berth creaks every time he shifts. Each
man thinks the shipload is the rottenest gang ever thrown together. He
wonders why they didn't bring somebody decent along. He gets to scoring
up grudges against the different people, and waits his chance to get
back."

He stopped a minute, and looked around at the doctors, who were giving
him close attention. Then he went on with the same intensity.

"Now that's war, only war is more so. Here you are in one place for
sixteen months. You shovel yourself into a stinking hole in the ground.
At seven in the morning, you boil yourself some muddy coffee that tastes
like the River Thames at Battersea Bridge. You take a knife that's had
knicks hacked out of it, and cut a hunk of dry bread that chews like
sand. You eat some 'bully beef out of a tin, same tinned stuff as you've
been eating ever since your stomach went on strike a year ago. Once a
week for a treat, you cut a steak off the flank of a dead horse. That
tastes better, because it's fresh meat. When you're sent back a few
miles, _en 'piquet_, you sleep in a village that looks like Sodom after
the sulphur struck it. Houses singed and tumbled, dead bodies in the
ruins, a broken-legged dog, trailing its hind foot, in front of the
house where you are. Tobacco--surely. You'd die if you didn't have a
smoke. But the rotten little cigarettes with no taste to them that smoke
like chopped hay. And the cigars made out of rags and shredded
toothpicks--"

"Here, have a cigarette," suggested the youngest doctor.

But the man was too busy in working out his own thoughts.

"The whole thing," he continued, "is a mixture o