talk about most anything if he was so minded. He was, moreover, as
well known and loved in Spring Road and Elmwood as he was in his own
town. So Green Valley folks leaned back, certain that this speech
would be worth hearing.

The bulky figure in army blue stepped to the edge of the platform and
for a silent minute towered above his neighbors like one of the great
trees he so loved. Then, without warning or preface, he began to talk
to them.

"War is pretty--when the uniforms are new and the band is playing. War
is glorious to read about and talk about--when it's all over. But war
is every kind of hell imaginable for everybody and everything while
it's going on! And they lie who say that it ever was, is, or can be
anything else. Every soldier here to-day above ground or below it will
and would tell you the same.

"And they are fools who say that wars cannot be prevented. War is the
rough and savage tool of a world as yet too ignorant to invent and use
any other. But here and there, in odd corners of the world, an
ever-increasing number of men are recognizing it as a disease, due to
ignorance, as possible to cure and wipe out, as any other of the
horrible plagues of mankind.

"When I was twenty-three I too believed in war. I liked the uniform, I
liked the excitement of going, I liked the idea of 'fighting for the
right.' I was too young and too ignorant to realize that older, better
men than I on the other side felt just as right as I did. In those
days war was the only tool and we thought it right, and some of us went
hating it and some of us went shouting like fools. I went for the lark