“Human life!” cried Baumgartner, leaping to his feet, his huge shadow guying him on the ceiling. “What is this human life, and who are you and I, that we set such store by it? The great men of this world never did; it’s only the little people and the young who pule and whine about human life. The ancient Roman sacrificed his weaklings as on an altar; there are some of us in these days who would prescribe a Tarpeian Rock for modern decadence. So much in pious parenthesis! Napoleon thought nothing of your human life. Von Moltke, Bismarck, and our staff in Germany thought as little of it as Napoleon; the Empire of my countrymen was founded on a proper appreciation of the infinitesimal value of human life, and your British Empire will be lost through exaggerating its importance. Blood and Iron were our watchwords; they’re on the tip of every Fleet Street pen to-day, but I speak of what I know. I’ve heard the Iron shriek without ceasing, like the wind, and I’ve felt the Blood like spray from a hot spring! I fought at Gravelotte; as a public schoolboy you probably never heard the name before this minute. I fought in the Prussian Guard. I saw you looking at the pictures downstairs. I was in that charge across those hellish ridges. Over two thousand of us fell dead in half an hour, but we gained the victory. More Germans were killed that day—that sweltering August afternoon—than English in your whole South African War that took you years! The flower of Germany fell at Gravelotte; that was human life with a vengeance! But an Empire rose out of my comrades’ ashes. And that’s all it’s for, this human life of yours: for the master-builders to lay out in their wisdom on the upward road.” The schoolboy was carried away. In the sudden eloquence of this strange outburst, with its poetic frenzy, its ruthless idealism, its wild bloodthirsty nobility, the youthful listener lost sight of its irrelevancy, or rather it was the irrevelant features that flared up first in his brain. It was a childish question, but here was a very child, and he could not help asking the fierce old soldier whether he had escaped without a wound. “Without a scratch,” was the reply. “I come home. I leave the army. I ally my human life with one that is all but divine. My Queen is struck down dead at my side within a year. And you expect me to pity the veriest pawn in the game!”