“... Destiny and nature are, after all, the only artists of any courage, of any humour. Do they take Rawdon Westmacott? for whose disappearance all concerned must pray; no, they take Daphnis, who, of the thirty or forty million fighting men, is in the minority that should be spared. “From the beginning they have exercised their wit on these innocent country people. How can we escape from their humour, when it gambols around us in the unseen? we cannot escape it, we can only hope to cap it with the superlative humour of our indifference. “Around how many homes must it be gambolling now! from the little centre in the Weald of Kent, which is known to both you and me, to the little unknown centres of human life in the heart of Asia, where anxiety dwells, and where no news will ever come, but where hope will flag and droop day by day, till at last it expires in hopeless certainty. “If you do not hear of me again, you may conclude that the arch-joker has taken me also, but remember that I shall have had the laugh on him after all, for I shall not care. However, I shall probably be spared, for no man or woman would weep for me. “One’s chief need, one’s principal craving, I find, is to get Death into his true proportion. We have always been accustomed to think of Death as a suitable and even dignified ending to life in old age, but to regard the overtaking of youth by Death in quite a different light, as an unspeakable calamity. Here, of course, such an overtaking is of everyday occurrence. This, you will say, is a truism. I answer, that there is no such thing as truism in war; there is only Truth. “If I take all my reflections about Death, slender as is their worth, and pass them through a sieve of analysis, what do I get? I get, as a dominant factor, Pity. Pity, yes, pity that these young men should have missed the good things life would have given them; not horror so much that they should be in the blackness below the ground, as pity that they should not be above it in the light....” An intense anger and irritation rose in me at his passive acceptance of what he termed fate. If man must struggle against his fellow-men in order to survive in the life-battle, then why not against fate also? He who does not resist must inevitably be crushed. It was at this stage that my great scheme began to formulate in my mind, by which I should defeat fate for the sake of Malory and Ruth; partly, largely, for the sake of their happiness, but partly also, I must admit, for the triumph of taking Malory by the hand and showing him how with the help of a little energy I had overcome the destiny he had been passively prepared to accept as inevitable. I would pit my philosophy against his philosophy, and incidentally bring two muddled lives to a satisfactory conclusion. I hugged my scheme to myself in the succeeding months as a lunatic hugs an obsession. III