THE V.C.


I had forgotten that I ordered frogs' legs. When mine were placed before
me I laughed. I always laugh at the sight of frogs' legs because of the
person and the day of which they remind me. Nobody noticed that I
laughed or asked the reason why, though it was an audible chuckle, and
though I sat at the head of my own dinner-party at the Cosmic Club.

The man for whom the dinner was given, Colonel Robert Thornton, my
cousin, a Canadian, who got his leg shot off at Vimy Ridge, was making
oration about the German Crown Prince's tactics at Verdun, and that was
the reason that ten men were not paying attention to me and that I was
not paying attention to Bobby. When the good chap talks human talk,
tells what happened to people and what their psychological processes
seemed to be, he is entertaining. He has a genuine gift of sympathy and
a power to lead others in the path he treads; in short, he tells a good
story. But like most people who do one thing particularly well he is
always priding himself on the way he does something else. He likes to
look at Colonel Thornton as a student of the war, and he has the time of
his life when he can get people to listen to what he knows Joffre and
Foch and Haig and Hindenberg ought to have done. So at this moment he
was enjoying his evening, for the men I had asked to meet him, all
strangers to him, ignorant of his real powers, were hanging on his
words, partly because no one can help liking him whatever he talks
about, and partly because, with that pathetic empty trouser-leg and the