“For instance, I got a good one from two fellows of the Browns whom I met on the road the first day we arrived.  They were reservists.  We were soon talking together and so peaceably that I was sceptical if they were Browns at all.  So I determined on a test.  I told them I was from a distant province and hadn’t travelled much and wouldn’t they please take off their hats.  They consented very good-naturedly.”

“Oh, good old Hugo!  He got one on the Browns!”

“I’d like to have been there to see it!”

“And when they took off their hats, what then?”

“Why, I said:  ‘This isn’t convincing at all.’” Hugo’s drawl paused for a second while interest developed. “’You haven’t any horns!  Haven’t you any forked tails, either?  Or are they curled up nicely inside your trousers’ legs?’”

“Whew!  But they must have felt cheap to have been got in that way!”

“And old Hugo looking so solemn!”

“Just like he does now!”

But the judge’s son said under his breath, “Very pretty!” and the doctor’s son, who was next him in the ranks, nodded understandingly.

“It seems they had checked their horns and tails at the frontier,” Hugo continued, “and, as I had left mine hanging in the rifle racks at the barracks, we got on together like real human beings.  I found they could speak my language better than my lesson-book try at theirs—­yes, as well as I can speak it myself—­and that made it all the easier.  After a while I mentioned the war.  They were very amiable and they didn’t begin to call me a swill-eating land-shark or any other of the pretty names I’ve heard they are so fond of using.  ‘We want to keep what is ours,’ they said.  ’Your side will have to start the fight by crossing the line.  We shall not!"’

“Because they know they’ll be licked!” put in Pilzer hotly.

“No, we may beat them in fighting,” agreed Hugo, “but these two fellows had me beaten on the argument!”

“They hauled down our flag!  They insulted us in their despatches!  They quibble!  They’re the perfidious Browns!” cried big Eugene Aronson, speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which had it from the premier.

“There, he’s got you again, Gene!”

“Yes, you funny old simpleton!  You are almost too easy!”

There was something of the vivacity of the barrack-room banter in the exclamations at Eugene’s expense.  Yet they were not the same.  The look on no man’s face was the same.  The humorist was silent.

“What next, Hugo?”

He half stared at them, and his mask was not solemn but tragic.

“I was thinking how men work their courage up, as if patriotism were a Moloch of which they were afraid,” he said.  “How in order to get killed we go out to kill others, when right is on their side!  How you, Armand, or you, Eugene, might be dead before to-morrow!  How—.”

“The bullet is not made that will get me!” exclaimed Eugene, with a swelling breath from his bellows-like lungs.