pungently of freshly turned earth, a smother of flowers is strewn. The poet sings of victory. The politicians go forth to address their constituents. And Congress, in the warm afterglow of battle, cheerfully appropriates a million dollars to distribute up and down the land the trophies of the Great War."
"I see nothing objectionable," I said, "in any part of your programme. Everyone seems to be making the best of it. What more can one do? Surely you wouldn't propose harrowing the feelings of the parents who had lost their son by an exhibition or a Zolaesque description of the boy's face."
"No," Thorpe retorted tenaciously, "but I should like to harrow a little the feelings of parents who have not lost their son. I should like to harrow the feelings of Jack Fairley's parents. Already they and ninety per cent. of the American people are beginning to think of those four infernal years as a fairy-tale, with some breathless places in the middle, but coming out all right and happy in the end. In a little while the mere physical reek and wreck will be cleared away, and ten years hence our schoolboys will speak of the year 1914 without a thought of hunger, disease, gas-gangrene, trench fever, lice, or carrion—the spectres which rise
