m never likely to forget it. But a man is born to
die, sir, and he's born to do his duty. I dare say I'm a simple thinker,
Major de Blacquaire, but there are things a hundred times worse than
war, and if you didn't believe that God sent them, you would have to
turn infidel. I've seen two or three choleras, here and there, and a
Black Death and a bubonic plague. What does it all mean? Jarring forces,
sir, which Heaven will reconcile in its own good time. And that's what
war means to my mind. You go where you're sent, just as the germ of
disease, or whatever you call it, goes, and you do what you are set
to do. And I'll say this for war, sir, as an old Christian man who has
spent his life at it. It's the fire of God, to my way of thinking, and
it burns out all manner of meannesses, and hypocrisies, and we should
have a devil of a lot more to be ashamed of than we have if we didn't
get into a solid fight now and again.'

'It is a school, sir,' said De Blacquaire.

'By heaven, sir,' said the solemn General, 'it is a school.'

'But there are more class-rooms than one in the great school house of
human nature, and whilst the General was setting forth his theories of
war, young Polson Jervase was setting out a theory of another and an
opposite fashion as he walked the deck with Irene.

He was deadly serious also, for all that part of life which seems best
worth having lay before him. And the two had many talks as they paced
the decks, morn and eve together. Irene was almost the only lady on
board, and most of the dot-and-go-one boys who had exchanged a natural
limb for a timber toe, and the loose-sleeved men who had left an arm
behind them at Sevastopol, had been beneath her care. And those who did
not know her ministrations in effect knew them by oral tradition, and
the bronzed fellows stumping and tramping up and down saluted her
with such a worship that her heart was like a fountain of glad tears a
hundred times in a day.

A girl has a natural and inborn right to be proud of her sweetheart in
any earthly circumstances whatsoever, if he were the merest snub-nosed,
freckled, and chinless Jones that ever skipped over a counter. But to
have an approved and veritable here for a lover, and to live at the same
time as the sole heroine of so narrow a little world as a shipful of
soldiers the incense of whose hearts went up about her constantly, was
to be more than merely proud and happy. Polson had got a permanent crick
in his