“For God’s sake, you asses, don’t talk so much. I’m sick of this war. I’m sick of reading that a lot of decent chaps have died for nothing, because it is for nothing, if this country is never again going to be able to stand defeat or victory. War isn’t anything to admire in itself. All the good of war is what it makes of the people who fight, and what it makes of the people who stay at home.” The Olympians roared with laughter, and congratulated Michael on his humorous oration. “Can’t you see that I’m serious? that it is important to be gentlemen?” Michael shouted. “Who says we aren’t gentlemen?” demanded a very vapid, but slightly bellicose hero. “Nobody says _you_ aren’t a gentleman, you ass; at least nobody says you eat peas with a knife, but, my God, if you think it’s decent to wear that damned awful button in your coat when fellows are being killed every day for you, for your pleasure, for your profit, for your existence, all I can say is I don’t.” Michael felt that the climax of this speech was somewhat weak, and he relapsed into silence, biting his nails with the unexpressed rage of limp words. “You might as well say that the School oughtn’t to cheer at a football match,” said Abercrombie the Captain. “I would say so, if I thought that all the cheerers never expected and never even intended to play themselves. That’s why professional football is so rotten.” “You were damned glad to get your Third Fifteen cap,” Abercrombie pointed out gruffly. The laugh that followed this rebuke from the mightiest of the immortals goaded Michael into much more than he had intended to say when he began his unlucky tirade. “Oh, was I?” he sneered. “That’s just where you’re quite wrong, because, as a matter of fact, I don’t intend to play football any more, if School Footer is simply to be a show for a lot of wasters. I’m not going to exert myself like an acrobat in a circus, if it all means nothing.”