Peking, Manchuria and the Balkans--that I think of; also the
Schmedding Polar Failure. That last _was_ war--a spectacular
expedition of the Germans--

"I might as well make this a lecture, now that I've started," Lonegan
went on. "The war game isn't complex. All the bewildering
technicalities that bristle from a military officer's talk are just
big-name stuff designed to keep down the contempt of the crowd--the
oldest professional trick. Whenever the crowd gets to understand your
terminology your game is cooked. You know how it is in a drug-store,
and you've seen the old family doctor look wise....

"There's a lot of different explosives which they fire by mathematics,
and which you can learn in part from our homely encyclopedias, but the
main game will be fought out on the same principles that Attila fought
it and Genghis Khan--numbers, traps, unexpectedness, the same dull old
flanking activities, the raid of supplies and communications, the
bending back of wings, the crimp of a line by making a hole in one
part--and all that archaic rot. As I say, the game is extinct, so far
as our modern complicated intelligences go, and the men whose names
are biggest in the papers from now on are the same old beefy type of
rudiments whom a man wouldn't associate with in times of national
quiet.... I will end this by saying that the big story is the man--
the peasant, the trooper, the one blinded little dupe, who dies, or
plunges, or loses his legs in the name of the Fatherland--"

"I see that," said Peter; "but what really is interesting to me is this
peasant's blindness and the monkey other men make of him--"

"I'm glad you spoke of that, for it is a thing to avoid. Interesting, I