"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy business, that would be to my taste."
"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs, that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him, her eyes flaming demand and satire.
"No! War--necessary, horrible, hellish!" he replied. Something in her seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of euphonious terms.
"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at home--but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon--of her certainty that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded and the dying--an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"
"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance--the one out of a thousand. If it should happen to succeed we should play with our cards concealed and theirs on the table."
"The noble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"
"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."