“I want you to help me organize a general strike against war,” I said, as I began to blow out the candles. Then I paused to frame a question which I had kept unasked since our last evening of peace: “D’you remember blowing out the candles that night?” He nodded. “You left two. Why?” As he hesitated, I saw that he was frowning. I saw also that, like the rest of us, he had aged in the last five years, though the thin face had its old passionate vitality and the fine black hair its old gay disorder. Slight as ever, boyish as ever, he was none the less lined with the mental and physical tortures of the war. His very hesitation was a subtle mark of decline, as though for the first time in his life he doubted himself. “I knew in my bones that only two of us would come through,” he muttered. “I should be one; I couldn’t make a guess at the other.” “There aren’t more than half-a-dozen left out of all our generation,” I told him. “The old club-groups at Oxford. . . . I can’t look at them.” “And I couldn’t see ’em if I _did_ look. Not that I need to be reminded of them.” . . . The unseeing eyes flashed in sudden exaltation. “What death takes away, George, is very little by comparison with what he leaves! The men I’ve loved best in the world have been my father and your uncle and old Burgess and you and Jim. Three of you, thank God!, are alive: I stayed with Burgess for his last night before he retired from Melton; but you’re no more alive than my father and Jim. Nothing can take away the time I spent with them. . . . I shan’t see again in this world, but nothing can take away all that I’ve seen in the past. I still see the men I recruited, the men who trained with me, though I helped to bury more than a few.” “Some of them were here to-night,” I said. “Yes! And what death has done is just to put their bodies out of action . . . . That means there are fewer hands and more work.” . . . As I led him to the door, O’Rane’s fingers ran lightly down my arm. “It’s about twenty years since you first came to stay with us,” I reminded him. “I suppose it must be. Good, full years.” “I was feeling middle-aged till you came. Middle-aged and depressed.” He laughed and gripped my hand: “We’ve no time to grow middle-aged. It’s the next twenty years that will count. We must pull together. In a sense we _are_ the last two.” As I blew out the remaining candles, the room once more seemed to fill with our friends of other days. We were indeed almost the only survivors; and I could not tell these ghosts that they had given their lives, I could not tell O’Rane that he had given his sight, to no purpose. “Think over what we’ve been saying,” I suggested. “Tell me if you can see any reason why just such another war shouldn’t break out with just as little reason.” “If it does, then this war wasn’t worth while. . . . And it’s our business to make it worth while,” he answered. CHAPTER THREE