Now Green Valley knew how Doc Philipps hated to talk about almost everything except trees. But Green Valley also knew that Doc could talk about most anything if he was so minded. He was, moreover, as well known and loved in Spring Road and Elmwood as he was in his own town. So Green Valley folks leaned back, certain that this speech would be worth hearing. The bulky figure in army blue stepped to the edge of the platform and for a silent minute towered above his neighbors like one of the great trees he so loved. Then, without warning or preface, he began to talk to them. "War is pretty--when the uniforms are new and the band is playing. War is glorious to read about and talk about--when it's all over. But war is every kind of hell imaginable for everybody and everything while it's going on! And they lie who say that it ever was, is, or can be anything else. Every soldier here to-day above ground or below it will and would tell you the same. "And they are fools who say that wars cannot be prevented. War is the rough and savage tool of a world as yet too ignorant to invent and use any other. But here and there, in odd corners of the world, an ever-increasing number of men are recognizing it as a disease, due to ignorance, as possible to cure and wipe out, as any other of the horrible plagues of mankind. "When I was twenty-three I too believed in war. I liked the uniform, I liked the excitement of going, I liked the idea of 'fighting for the right.' I was too young and too ignorant to realize that older, better men than I on the other side felt just as right as I did. In those days war was the only tool and we thought it right, and some of us went hating it and some of us went shouting like fools. I went for the lark of it, for I knew no better. I marched away in a new uniform with the band playing and the flags snapping. And on the little old farm my father gave me I left a nineteen-year-old wife with my one-year-old baby. "Next door to that wife and baby of mine lived a man who did not believe in war, a man who, even when conscription came and he was called, refused to go to war. He hired a substitute and stayed at home. And for that Green Valley has marked that man a coward and every year sits in judgment upon him. "Yet the man who would not go to war stayed at home to plough my fields and plant them. He it was who saw to it that that wife of mine and the wives of other war-mad boys did not want for bread. He stayed at home here and minded his business and ours as well. He wrote letters and got news for our women when they got to fretting too hard. He harvested our crops, tended our stock, and mended our fences because he is so made that he cannot bear to see things wasted, neglected, ruined.