soldier to the spirit of the civilian that the present hour waits.

'I hate that which is not written with blood,' said Nietzsche. The war-time philosophy of the civilian world is still written with typewriters and pens, in editorial sanctums and in church studies. And all these easy creeds and dogmas must ultimately vanish before a faith which is being written now with blood.

The mood which must, somehow, by some miracle of imagination and sympathy, creep into our unsaved civilian soul, if the gulf between our world and the world of the soldier is not to be a sinister and widening gulf, is the mood of the poet:

In earth or heaven,

Bold sailor on the sea, What have I given,

That you should die for me?

What can I give,

O soldier leal and brave, Long as I live,

To pay the life you gave?

What tithe or part

Can I return to thee,

O stricken heart,

That thou shouldst break for me?

The wind of Death

For you has slain life's flowers,
It withereth

(God grant) all weeds in ours. The sombrest transcript out of all the war, which the bystander has found, is not any record of battlefields, or any story of horrors or atrocities, but rather 'Some Reflections of a Soldier' — re.flections which for the moment were the articulate expression of all this inarticulateness at the heart of our time, the inarticulateness which marched in those men from the trenches that spring day of 1917:

It is very nice to be home again. Yet am I at home? One sometimes doubts it. There are occasions when I feel like a visi

tor among strangers whose intentions are kindly, but whose modes of thought I neither altogether understand nor altogether approve. You speak lightly, you assume that we shall speak lightly of things, emotions, states of mind, human relationships, and affairs which are to us solemn or terrible. You seem ashamed, as if they were a kind of weakness, of the ideas which sent us to France, and for which thousands of sons and lovers have died. You calculate the profits to be derived from 'War after the War,' as though the unspeakable agonies of

the Somme were an item in a commercial transaction. You make us feel that the country to which we've returned is not the country for which we went out to fight.

I cannot dismiss as trivial the picture which you make to yourselves of war and the mood in which you contemplate that work of art. They are an index of the temper in which you will approach the problems of peace. You are anxious to have a truthful account of the life of a soldier at the front. You would wish to enter, as far as human beings can enter, into his internal life, to know how he regards the tasks imposed upon him, how he conceives his relation to the enemy and to yourselves, from what sources he derives encouragement and comfort. You would wish to know these things; we should wish you to know them. Yet between you and us there hangs a veil. It is mainly of your own unconscious creation. It is not a negative, but a positive thing. It is not intellectual, it is moral. It is not ignorance, it is falsehood. I read your papers and listen to your conversation, and I see clearly that you have chosen to make to yourselves an image of war, not as it is, but of a kind which, being picturesque, flatters your appetite for novelty, for excitement, for easy admiration without troubling you with masterful emotions. You have chosen, I say, to make an image, because you do not like, or cannot bear the truth; because you are afraid of what may happen to your souls if you expose them to the inconsistencies and contradictions, the doubts and bewilderments, which lie beneath the surface of things. You are not deceived as to the facts; for facts of this order are not worth official lying. You are deceived as to the Fact.

is a burden they carry with aching bones, hating it, hoping dimly that, by shouldering it now, they will save others from it in the future. They carry their burden with little help from you. For an army does not live by munitions alone, but also by fellowship in a moral idea or purpose. And that you cannot give us.

No, the fact is we've drifted apart. We have slaved for Rachael, but it looks as if we'd got to live with Leah. We have drifted apart, partly because we have changed and you have not; partly, and that in the most important matters, because we have not changed and you have. . . . We are strengthened by reflections which you have abandoned. Our foreground may be different, but our background is the same. It is that of August to November, 1914. We are your ghosts.

It was during the campaign of Warsaw that we had the news. There appeared in an obscure pacifist sheet, which had somehow slipped in from Russia, a paragraph which told of the death of a young Polish lieutenant, Stanislav Ivanoff, who had been shot by his commander for refusing to lead his men into battle. The incident was worthy of note, the newspaper went on to say, because Ivanoff had refused, not so much through the fear of being killed, as through the fear of killing.

Mother's eyes narrowed as she read. 'Ivanoff' she repeated thoughtfully; 'Stanislav Ivanoff-Stasya- Do you think it could be?'

'Not Stasya! Surely not our Stasya!' And, even as I denied it, my mind

went back over a score of years and countless miles, back to our early years on the edge of the forest which fringes the Black Sea, and I knew that there could be no doubt. It is an almost impossible combination of namesStanislav Ivanoff. And, besides, it was logical, so brutally logical, this end, for him.

I

Stasya was the boy the tip of whose finger we sliced off one day with the corn-chopper which we had been forbidden to touch.

Up to that day there had been no joy for us in Stasya's visits. We found it hard to forgive him for being what he was instead of what we had expected

him to be; and we had had the right to expect much from the boy who lived on the most wonderful spot in all the world. Our own place was delightful enough, holding, as it did, the centre of a wooded crescent which sloped sharply down to the sea; but at each end of the curving slope a dizzy cliff jutted out over the sea itself, and one of these cliffs belonged to Stasya's father, the black-bearded and silent and appalling Ivanoff, who sometimes came to take his tea with us.

It must have been much like the deck of a giant's ship, that cliff, when Stasya turned his back upon the land; it must have rocked gloriously to the beat of the waves on stormy nights. Through its base went the railroad tunnel, so that, many times each day, Stasya stood straight over the rushing train, and, when it had passed, the smoke crept up to him from both sides at once. And, as if that were not enough, there was the cross which topped the summit of the rise behind the house.

Crosses were not unknown to us we had one of our own, a thick and clumsy affair which marked the forest grave of our favorite dog Rudkó; it was our secret, shared only by Ashim, our oldest Turk, who had helped us at our task, dubiously enough, his Mohammedan soul rebelling against the injustice to the dog. But there was nothing dreadful about Rudkó's cross. We knew that, after a season of rain, it would rot at the base and fall over into the fern and be forgotten. It had not grown out of the top of the cliff, it did not stand

straight and slender and black against the dawn, it did not reach desperately up into the sky. And it did not make us afraid at twilight.

We knew, of course, for chance reports had reached us - snatches of the cliff's history, vague bits which conjured vistas of an entrancing world.

We had heard that Ivanoff's parents had been killed on that cliff in the dim days before the Turkish War; that Ivanoff himself had renounced fame as an engineer and the promise of a fortune because tune because-and we accepted it literally - he could not breathe air which did not smell of our sea; that, for a time, his wife, the loveliest person of all the earth, had lived there with him. Of her we knew from Ashim, who once had worked for Ivanoff.

'Like a little kitten she was,' he would tell us when, in the solemn month of the Ramazan, we sat with him on the hilltop and helped him with his long vigil for the first star whose coming broke the daily fast of the faithful; 'like a little lamb, soft and helpless. All day she sang when first they came, and it was good at that time to work for the bearded one; he was like a happy sultan, with laughter enough for all who might come near. But she did not sing long, and after a time her eyes were always red, and the bearded one swore horribly at us as we worked. Very soon she died, and then he buried her body and his laugh together in one grave and built that cross over them both. So I went away in search of a glad master. Perhaps I should have stayed.'

'Ashim! A star!'

Heads thrown back, fingers pointing frantically, we waited until his slower eyes had picked the faint twinkle from the transparent sky-until, with a sigh, he closed his yellow teeth on his crust of corn-bread, then trotted away, eagerly building his last story into another wild and wholly satisfying tale. And in these tales, the reckless, the heroic, the impossible deeds were always performed by Stasya, the mysterious boy who had never known his mother and who lived beside the grave of his father's laugh.

And, with the image of that father

before us, it was not hard to create the image of the son. Not so tall he was as the elder Ivanoff, perhaps, but quite as fierce; denied the father's heavy beard, but richly blessed with his hard eyes and fixed frown, with the bitter mouth which never smiled, the voice which rumbled deep within his body, the thick hands which bent a horseshoe as if it were of tin. We knew that he, too, stooped from the shoulders when he walked, and dragged his huge feet as though forever following the plough; we knew that he, too, rushed in between fighting dogs and tore them apart by twisting their collars till they gasped for air. We used to talk without end of seeing him some time, of calling a greeting to him, of hearing his gruff voice answering. He was a rare and an alluring child, the Stasya of our dreams.

The real Stasya, when one day he came to us, proved a very slim, very blond little boy, incredibly fragile, incredibly gentle, incredibly shy. He held the hand of his Polish governess and smiled a beseeching smile.

'Go and play!' said Ivanoff.

But Stasya did not know how to play. We stared at him in helpless amazement, and through our outraged minds went the thought of the treasures we had stored against his coming; the two-edged Turkish knife, the pirates' swords, the bleached bone of a murdered child, we could not show it to a grown-up lest it be ruthlessly linked with a sheep or dog, the knotted club which the sea had given us and which, beyond the shadow of a doubt, had drifted from the hand of an Australian blackfellow, following the tortuous course which we had often traced for it upon our globe. We thought of these, and glared at Stasya, and Stasya smiled his pitiful smile and held more tightly to the hand of Mademoiselle.

He came very often after that, and

we might have been kinder had he come alone. We had no love for Mademoiselle; for, instead of surrendering her charge into our keeping when she came, and retreating behind a book, she made us all her temporary charges, and her unending admonitions, delivered in stiff, roundabout Russian, ring in my ears to this day.

'Let the biggest one descend from the tree,' she would shout, her bony finger following her words, she never

did learn our names, - 'lest he scratch his knees and tear his stockings! The one in the blue blouse has eaten enough wild strawberries! The small infants must not walk to the house unattended, the large dogs will harm them! Let the girl accompany them; it is not the affair of a girl anyway - the building of a fort!'

And, since scratched knees and torn stockings were not worth anybody's mentioning; since one could never eat enough wild strawberries; since the large dogs would have killed any one who tried to harm the 'small infants'; and since the girl resented her sex sufficiently without being reminded of its limitations, Stasya's Polish governess became so brother Fedik put it — a person one must needs despise, but could not stoop to hate. And because Stasya obeyed her, and because we held him traitor to' the cliff and the tunnel and the cross, we despised him also and dubbed him kissél, — which translates itself into custard, and our games when he was with us narrowed down to the one of trying to kidnap him from Mademoiselle.

And on the day of the corn-chopper we had succeeded. From the steep meadow below the deserted house we watched Mademoiselle's pink dress darting wildly in and out among the shrubbery, and our triumph must have gone to our heads. For we fell upon the forbidden machine and sent its wheels

spinning, shouting to each other in Turkish which, we felt, offset Stasya's French and Polish combined. And because we were very gay, and because he felt sadly out of it, and because he wanted to play with us, Stasya put out a very bold finger and touched a revolving disk.

The next instant, the wheels of the corn-chopper still whirring behind us, we were racing back to the house and to father, calling to Stasya to keep his hand high in the air as he ran. Past the grinning Turks we went, past Mademoiselle, who shrieked, through the house, and to the 'stand-up' desk in the library. Father looked down coolly he was often thus disturbed; so often that he had converted the desk-drawer into a first-aid box and was wont to give thanks to the far-seeing Providence which, in his youth, had led him to a doctor's diploma. Without a word he lifted Stasya to the couch, his big, deft hands went swiftly about the task, and we were entirely forgotten. But when the bandage had been brought down across the back of Stasya's hand and tied around the thin wrist, when Stasya's white mouth had relaxed a little, father turned a very stern face upon the rest of us.

'Corn-chopper?'

We shifted and swallowed and said nothing. And in the heavy silence Stasya's quavering voice sounded thin and uncertain and ridiculously inadequate:

'It was not the corn-chopper! I was playing with Fedik's knife!'

We heard it with scorn, we who knew that it was useless to lie to father and knew little of the lie which winks at truth so little that we did not understand why father turned quickly back to Stasya, why his stern eyes took on the smiling look we loved, why he bowed so gravely his acknowledgment of the clumsy fib. We did not under

stand, quite, why we were not punished or why the corn-chopper was not locked away. But we knew that we could never touch it again, and we knew that Stasya was not a kissél. And, very earnestly now, we seized upon the task of teaching him to play with us.

It was easier after Ivanoff caught Mademoiselle lifting Stasya from a limb to which we had boosted him, for she never again came without a book; but now Ivanoff himself took her place, which bothered us - it is hard to slay giants before a grown-up who stands with his arms crossed on his breast, looks on with his hard eyes, and neither smiles nor says a word. Yet Stasya learned a little. He could skip fairly well, and he made a first-class merchant. Stick-in-a-hole fared worse; he confessed his fear of the stick's sharpened ends. In our pirate games he was always the priest who buried the dead and had no part in either the killing or the dying, which left us dreadfully short-handed for real work, when, as lawless Georgians, we held up a stage, and he came — a distant relative under a white flag to bring ransom for the captives. And once, and on that day Ivanoff left us abruptly, he — delighted me by taking my place in the wigwam where I had been sulkily awaiting the return of my scalp-hunting braves.

So it went for several months, until one afternoon, in the Straits of Gibraltar, we scuttled a ship laden with Spanish gold. On that day we had decided that we could no longer be bothered with buryings, and Stasya, his chin quivering but his hand tight upon his wooden cutlass, went readily enough into attack. It was then that we heard a sound which startled us. High on the bank above us Ivanoff was laughing and our battle grew more furious as we heard it. We were having a beautiful time of it when, suddenly and without