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Well, there was capacity for emotion left in Stacey,—that was clear. Any one’s first impression of him would have been wrong. The question was—capacity for what emotion? A fierce chill intensity glowed in, or perhaps behind, his face. It died down as swiftly as it had kindled.

“What a—what a ghastly blunder!” Philip Blair murmured.

Catherine said nothing.

“That’s what war is,” Stacey replied. “One blunder after another. The side which makes the most blunders loses. A trite thought, but true.”

“Then the Germans made the most?”

“Oh, by far!”

“Strange! For a while they seemed invincible—machine-perfect.”

Stacey lit a fresh cigarette. “It was the legend they threw out. They might have won perhaps if they hadn’t grown to believe in it themselves,” he remarked, almost indifferently.

He laid his cigarette down suddenly and smiled. “Come!” he said, with a hard cheerfulness, “I’ll tell you about something pleasant—the reason I’m here only now, the reason I didn’t get my ‘majority,’ the reason they packed me off to Italy after the Armistice, the one thing I ‘did in the Great War’ that I’ll tell my son about. It was in the Argonne, and I was in command of a battalion—had been for a long time. We were in a fairly isolated position. You know what the Argonne was—woods, lightly held as to numbers by the enemy, careful, oh, so careful, machine-gun nests everywhere! We’d had terrible losses but had plugged on through, little by little. Paused at last. Sat still for about a week. Being bombarded in a desultory fashion, but comfortable enough—comparatively. This was November. Well, on November tenth, in the morning, I learned something that I hadn’t any business to learn,—that the Armistice was coming absolutely. On November tenth at four P.M. I received orders to attack the position in front of us—sweet little hill, picture-puzzle of machine-guns—at five A.M. the next morning, November eleventh—November eleventh! Well, I didn’t do it.”