One evening I was coming in to sleep in our stable bedroom.  The men lying along its length and breadth on the bundles of straw had been talking together and were agreed.  Some one had just wound it up—­“From the moment you start marching, that’s enough.”

But Termite, coiled up like a marmot on the common litter, was on the watch.  He raised his shock of hair, shook himself as though caught in a snare, waved the brass disk on his wrist like a bell and said, “No, that’s not enough.  You must think, but think with your own idea, not other people’s.”

Some amused faces were raised while he entered into observations that they foresaw would be endless.

“Pay attention, you fellows, he’s going to talk about militarism,” announced a wag, called Pinson, whose lively wit I had already noticed.

“There’s the question of militarism——­” Termite went on.

We laughed to see the hairy mannikin floundering on the dim straw in the middle of his big public-meeting words, and casting fantastic shadows on the spider-web curtain of the skylight.

“Are you going to tell us,” asked one of us, “that the Boches aren’t militarists?”

“Yes, indeed, and in course they are,” Termite consented to admit.

“Ha!  That bungs you in the optic!” Pinson hastened to record.

“For my part, old sonny,” said a Territorial who was a good soldier, “I’m not seeking as far as you, and I’m not as spiteful.  I know that they set about us, and that we only wanted to be quiet and friends with everybody.  Why, where I come from, for instance in the Creuse country, I know that——­”

“You know?” bawled Termite, angrily; “you know nothing about nothing!  You’re only a poor little tame animal, like all the millions of pals.  They gather us together, but they separate us.  They say what they like to us, or they don’t say it, and you believe it.  They say to you, ‘This is what you’ve got to believe in!’ They——­”

I found myself growing privately incensed against Termite, by the same instinct which had once thrown me upon his accomplice Brisbille.  I interrupted him.  “Who are they—­your ’they’?”

“Kings,” said Termite.

At that moment Marcassin’s silhouette appeared in the gray of the alley which ended among us.  “Look out—­there’s Marc’!  Shut your jaw,” one of the audience benevolently advised.

“I’m not afeared not to say what I think!” declared Termite, instantly lowering his voice and worming his way through the straw that divided the next stall from ours.

We laughed again.  But Margat was serious.  “Always,” he said, “there’ll be the two sorts of people there’s always been—­the grousers and the obeyers.”

Some one asked, “What for did you chap ’list?”

“’Cos there was nothing to eat in the house,” answered the Territorial, as interpreter of the general opinion.

Having thus spoken, the old soldier yawned, went on all fours, arranged the straw of his claim, and added, “We’ll not worry, but just let him be.  ’Specially seeing we can’t do otherwise.”