all sorts of things, but they're poor amateurs at war. They've got no physical staying power, and that's the whole thing. They've never slept in the open one night in their lives; they've never drunk anything but the purest water-company water; they've never gone short of three meals a day since they left their feeding-bottles. Half their cavalry never cocked leg over horse till it enlisted six months ago. They ride their horses as though they were bicycles—you watch 'em! They're fools at the game, and they know it. Our boys of fourteen can give their grown men points. . . . Very well"
The war correspondent mused on his face with his nose between his knuckles.
"If a decent civilization," he said, "cannot produce better men for war than"
He stopped with belated politeness.
"I mean"
"Than our open-air life," said the young lieutenant, politely.
"Exactly," said the war correspondent. "Then civilization has to stop."
"It looks like it," the young lieutenant admitted.
"Civilization has science, you know," said the war correspondent. "It invented and it makes the rifles and guns and things you use."
"Which our nice healthy hunters and stockmen and so on, rowdy-dowdy cowpunchers and negro-whackers, can use ten times better thanWhat's that?"
"What?" said the war correspondent, and then seeing his companion busy with his field-glass he produced his own: "Where?" said the war correspondent, sweeping the enemy's lines.
"It's nothing" said the young lieutenant, still looking.
"What's nothing?"
_-_p762.png)
"'Boom!' came from somewhere far away to the left."
The young lieutenant put down his glass and pointed. "I thought I saw something there, behind the stems of those trees. Something black. What it was I don't know."
The war correspondent tried to get even by intense scrutiny.
"It wasn't anything" said the young lieutenant, rolling over to regard the darkling evening sky, and generalized: "There never will be anything any more for ever. Unless"
The war correspondent looked inquiry.
"They may get their stomachs wrong, or something—-living without proper drains."
A sound of bugles came from the tents behind. The war correspondent slid backward down the sand and stood up. "Boom!" came from somewhere far away to the left. "Halloa!" he said, hesitated, and crawled back to peer again. "Firing at this time is jolly bad manners."
The young lieutenant was incommunicative again for a space.
Then he pointed to the distant clump of trees again. "One of our big guns. They were firing at that." he said.
"The thing that wasn't anything?"
"Something over there, anyhow."
Both men were silent, peering through their glasses for a space. "Just when it's twilight," the lieutenant complained. He stood up.
"I might stay here a bit," said the war correspondent.
The lieutenant shook his head. "There is nothing to see," he apologized, and then went down to where his little squad of sun-brown, loose-limbed men had been yarning in the trench. The war correspondent stood up also, glanced for a moment at the business-like bustle below him, gave perhaps twenty seconds to those enigmatical trees again, then turned his face toward the camp.
