hands in a comprehensive gesture. "We have done so weakly--Heaven alone knows why!" I can see him now, queer giant that he looked on that dawn-lit beach of splendour, the sea-birds flying about us and that crumpled death hard by, no bad symbol in his clumsiness and needless heat of the unawakened powers of the former time. I remember it as an integral part of that picture that far away across the sandy stretches one of those white estate boards I have described, stuck up a little askew amidst the yellow-green turf upon the crest of the low cliffs.
He talked with a sort of wonder of the former things. "Has it ever dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness--the pettiness!--of every soul concerned in a declaration of war?" he asked. He went on, as though speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who first gave the horror words at the cabinet council, "an undersized Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek--the sort of fool who is brought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. . . ."
"All the time almost," he said, "I was watching him--thinking what an ass he was to be trusted with men's lives. . . . I might have done better to have thought that of myself. I was doing nothing to prevent it all! The damned imbecile was up to his neck in
