Shall I ever eat a good dinner
again?'
He looked wistfully at the bare table.
'Will you ever want to?' said Arthur, quietly.
A momentary silence fell upon the little party. Bernard Strang had
lost two brothers in the war, and Chicksands had no sooner spoken
than he reproached himself for a tactless brute. But, suddenly, the
bells of the Abbey rang: out above their heads, playing with every
stroke on the nerves of the listeners. For the voice of England was
in them, speaking to that under-consciousness which the war has
developed in us all.
'Any news?' said Strang, looking at Arthur.
'No. The Eastern business gets a little worse every day.'
'And the "Offensive"?
'Let them! Our men want nothing better.'
On which the dinner resolved itself into a device for making the
Captain talk. The War Office crisis, the men gathered in conclave at
Versailles, and that perpetual friction between the politician and
the soldier, which every war, big or little, brings to the front,
and which will only end when war ends--those were the topics of it,
with other talk such as women like to listen to of men about
individual men, shrewd, careless, critical, strangely damning here,
strangely indulgent there, constant only in one quality--that it is
the talk of men and even if one heard it behind a curtain and
strained through distance, could never by any chance be mistaken for
the talk of women.
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