baseball had been tried among the German prisoners, but they are perfect dubs.  He doubts whether the Germans will ever be able to play ball.  They lack the national spirit.  On the other hand, Tom thinks that the English will play a great game when they really get into it.  He had two weeks’ leave in London and went to see the game that King George was at, and says that the King, if they will let him, will make the greatest rooter of the whole bunch.

Such was Tom’s war talk.

It grieved me to note that as the men sat smoking their cigars and drinking liqueur whiskey (we have cut out port at our house till the final peace is signed) Tom seemed to have subsided into being only a boy again, a first-year college boy among his seniors.  They spoke to him in quite a patronising way, and even asked him two or three direct questions about fighting in the trenches, and wounds and the dead men in No Man’s Land and the other horrors that the civilian mind hankers to hear about.  Perhaps they thought, from the boy’s talk, that he had seen nothing.  If so, they were mistaken.  For about three minutes, not more, Tom gave them what was coming to them.  He told them, for example, why he trained his “fellows” to drive the bayonet through the stomach and not through the head, that the bayonet driven through the face or skull sticks and,—­but there is no need to recite it here.  Any of the boys like Tom can tell it all to you, only they don’t want to and don’t care to.

They’ve got past it.

But I noticed that as the boy talked,—­quietly and reluctantly enough,—­the older men fell silent and looked into his face with the realisation that behind his simple talk and quiet manner lay an inward vision of grim and awful realities that no words could picture.

I think that they were glad when we joined the ladies again and when Tom talked of the amateur vaudeville show that his company had got up behind the trenches.

Later on, when the other guests were telephoning for their motors and calling up taxis, Tom said he’d walk to his hotel; it was only a mile and the light rain that was falling would do him, he said, no harm at all.  So he trudged off, refusing a lift.

Oh, no, I don’t think we need to worry about the returned soldier.  Only let him return, that’s all.  When he does, he’s a better man than we are, Gunga Dinn.

2.—­The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg

Although we had been members of the same club for years, I only knew Mr. Spugg by sight until one afternoon when I heard him saying that he intended to send his chauffeur to the war.

It was said quite quietly,—­no bombast or boasting about it.  Mr. Spugg was standing among a little group of listening members of the club and when he said that he had decided to send his chauffeur, he spoke with a kind of simple earnestness, a determination that marks the character of the man.

“Yes,” he said, “we need all the man power we can command.  This thing has come to a showdown and we’ve got to recognise it.  I told Henry that it’s a showdown and that he’s to get ready and start right away.”