Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/303

Rh have heard that! You should have seen that!"

He lifted the medal of St. George which was pinned to his rough tunic.

“The King himself," he said proudly, “placed that there, and there are few who have won it."

So through the tiresome voyage there was no escape. Then one afternoon we steamed into New York harbour, and I saw a city that seemed proud of an incomprehensible ignorance of the meaning of war.

The dusk thickened and lights flashed in a strange extravagance. Through the streets, as I drove uptown, passed laughing men and women, in and out of restaurants, into theatres and dance halls. It was like a city, uninstructed in reality.

After a time the sense of wrong vanished. One watched these men and women with a quick sympathy, limiting the period of their carelessness. For a question had survived through the months in Europe:

How long before we, too, will be at war?"

As I drove on the question drifted inevitably into a statement, brutal and unescapable:

“We, too, will be at war. It will not be long."