is war to gratify your ambition, I chose
to be one of the weapons of war; I chose, when driven to the wall, to be
true to that part of my children's oath that made an exception of the
burglar, the highwayman, and the invader. In war you use deceit and
treachery, under the pleasanter names of tactics and strategy, to draw
men to their death in traps, in order to increase the amount of your
killing. It was strategy, tactics, manoeuvres--give it any fine word
you please--that hideous and shameless part which I played. With fire I
fought fire. I fought for civilization, for my home, with the only means
I had against the wickedness of a victory of conquest--the precedent of
it in this age--a victory which should glorify such trickery as you
practised on your people."

"I should like to shoot you dead!" cried Bellini.

"No doubt. I like your honesty in saying so," said Marta. "Why not? The
business of war is murder; and as I have engaged in it I can claim no
exception. And why shouldn't women engage in it? Why should they be
excepted from the sport when they pay so many of the costs? It's easy to
die and easy to kill. The part you force on women is much harder. By
killing me you admit me to full equality."

"You--you--" But Bellini had no adequate word for her, and his anger
softened into a kind of admiration of her, of envy, perhaps, that he had
had no such adjutant. It hardened again as he looked Westerling up and
down, before turning to leave without a salute or even a direct word.

"And you let me make love to you!" Westerling said in a dazed, groping
monotone to Marta.

Such a wreck was he of his former self that she found it amazing that
she could not pity him. Yet she might have pitied him had he plunged
into the fight; had he tried to rally one of the broken regiments; had
he been able to forget himself.

"Rather, you made love to yourself through me," she answered, not
harshly, not even emphatically, but merely as a statement of passionless
fact. "If you dared to endure what you ordered others to endure for the
sake of your ambition; if--"

She was interrupted by a sharp zip in the air. Westerling dodged and
looked about wildly.

"What is that?" he asked. "What?"

Five or six zips followed like a charge of wasps flying at a speed that
made them invisible. Marta felt a brush of air past her cheek and
Westerling went chalky white. It was the first time he had been under
fire. But these bullets were only stra