Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/105

 "It's no good," barked Jack, with his hands in his pockets.

"Not a bit."

"If you're an officer, you study what is best, for the cause and for the men. You study your men. But you don't ask them what to do. If you do you're a wash-out."

"Quite."

"And that's where it is in politics. You see the papers howling and blubbering for a statesman. Why, if they'd got the finest statesman the world ever saw, they'd chuck him on to the scrap heap the moment he really wanted his own way, doing what he saw was the best. That's where they've got anybody who's any good—on the scrap-heap."

"Same the world over."

"It's got to alter somewhere."

"It has."

"When you've been through the army, you know that what you depend on is a general, and on discipline, and on obedience. And nothing else is the slightest. bit of good."

"But they say the civil world is not an army: it's the will of the people," cried Somers.

"Will of my grandmother's old tom-cat. They've got no will, except to stop anybody else from having any."

"I know."

"Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and the will of the people. Look at the country—going rottener every day, like an old pear."

"All the democratic world the same."

"Of course it's the same. And you may well say Australian soil is waiting to be watered with blood. It's waiting to be watered with our blood, once England's got too soft to help herself, let alone us, and the Japs come down this way. They'd squash us like a soft pear."

"I think it's quite likely."

"What?"

"Likely."

"It's pretty well a certainty. And would you blame them? If you was thirsty, wouldn't you pick a ripe pear if it hung on nobody's tree? Why, of course you would. And who'd blame you."

"Blame myself if I didn't," said Somers.

"And then their coloured labour. I tell you, this