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Stacey gazed at his friend with intellectual sympathy at least.

Phil went on slowly. “We believed in the war, too. Perhaps not quite so ardently as you, but we believed in it. It seemed, in the big essentials, right against wrong. We were told—oh, you know all the things we were told, the dreams we lived on!”

“I know,” said Stacey.

“All to end in this,—this bitter merciless peace, with all the seeds of new wars in it!”

“Well,” asked Stacey, “when you saw the futile pettiness that revealed itself in men, and the pomposity, and the selfishness, and the greed”—he spat the word out—“did you expect anything better?”

“Not after a while, no,” Phil replied steadily. “At first I did. When I saw the heroism. What happened to the war? A great wrong was done. Hundreds of thousands of you went to war nobly to right it. Belgium was invaded, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t remember,” said Stacey. “I suppose so. You touched the truth when you said we ‘went to war.’ What did we go to? Suppose one ant massacred another and you arranged an earthquake to punish it. That’s what happened. You see, a time came,” he continued slowly, an odd dazed look in his eyes,—“about 1916 it began, I should think—when all the surface seemed to have been stripped from life, one layer after another, until there was nothing left showing but universal naked pain. Nothing mattered except this. It was so much bigger than anything else. Belgium didn’t matter. Prussian militarism was a word. Love and hate disappeared, unimportant. Nothing was left but pain.”