Here is an example of a conversation between three youths of the Middle West who were soon to go through the Arc de Triomphe with a gun on their shoulders. Miss Willa Cather in “One of Ours,” and Mrs. Wharton in “A Son at the Front” had pictured the war as a fight of Providence occurring at the psychological moment to furnish an ideal to the young and give them a chance to let some steam off. These rookies in “Village” rather seem to belong in Barbusse’s “Squad.” They are the musketeers of despair, but of an ironical despair. The War is here, hurrah for the War! Little matter whether it be just or not, as long as it drags us out of the tedium of our village! Listen to these backsliding heroes exposing their philosophy of the great struggle: “You can stay out if we get in, if you will be that yellow-livered. There’ll never be conscription in this country.” “Won’t there? Don’t you ever believe there won’t. But even if there weren’t I’d have to go. Not because I couldn’t stand the gaff of being called yellow-livered, but just because feeling it all about me, and getting fed up with life anyway, I’d conclude what to hell, and enlist some day, but without at all believing I was going to serve any right cause by it, or that if we won that there would be a great and gentle democracy throughout the world. I’d just go, and kill Germans like the rest, because I’d get used to it being done; but if I ever stopped to think I would think that maybe some of the guys I killed were a hell of a lot more use in the world than I, or than fellows around me. But there--well, life’s life. Let ’em die. What’s useful anyway? Let’s talk of something else. I’m stalled.” “Say, boy, if you’d use your head on making dollars rather than on theories, you’d be better off,” Lloyd Scott advised. “I won’t waste my life in pessimism anyway.” “Neither will I; but I will live out my own temperament just because I must; and also because it’s more interesting than letting a set of social conventions which change with every generation and with geographical situations, dictate one’s actions. Why limit yourself?”