“It was our flag!” said Eugene.

“But we wouldn’t want them to put up their flag on our territory, would we?” Hugo asked.

“Let them try it!” thundered Eugene, with a full breath from the big bellows in his broad chest.  “Hugo, I don’t like to hear you talk that way,” he added, shaking his head sadly.  Such views from a friend really hurt him; indeed, he was almost lugubrious.  This brought another laugh.

“Don’t you see he’s getting you, Gene?”

“He’s acting!”

“He always gets you, you old simpleton!” The judge’s son gave Eugene an affectionate dig in the ribs.

Eugene was well liked and in the way that a big Saint Bernard dog is liked.  At the latest manoeuvres, on the night that their division had made a rapid flank movement, without any apparent sense that his own load was the heavier for it, he had carried the rifle and pack of Peter Kinderling, a valet’s pasty-faced little son “Peterkin,” as he was called, was the stupid of Company B. Being generally inoffensive, the butt of the drill sergeant, who thought that he would never learn even the manual of arms, and rounding out the variety of characters which makes for fellowship, he was regarded with a sympathetic kindliness by his comrades.

“But I don’t think you ought to joke about the flag That’s sacred!” declared Eugene.

“Now you’re talking!” said Jacob Pilzer, the butcher’s son, who sat on the other side of the bench from Eugene.  He was heavily built, with an undershot jaw and a patch of liverish birthmark on his cheek.

“Yes,” piped Peterkin, who had an opinion when the two strong men of the company agreed on any subject.  But he spoke tentatively, nevertheless.  He was taking no risks.

“Oh, if we went to war the Bodlapoo affair would be only an excuse,” said the manufacturer’s son.  “We shall go to war as a matter of broad national policy.”

“Right you are!” agreed the banker’s son.  “No emotion about it.  Emotion as an international quantity is dead.  Everything is business now in this business age.”

“Killing people as a broad international policy!” mused Hugo sotto voce, as if this were a matter of his own thoughts.

The others scarcely heard him as the manufacturer’s son struck his fist in the palm of his hand resoundingly to demand attention.

“We need room in which to expand.  We have eighty million people to their fifty, while our territory is only a little larger than theirs.  Our population grows; the Browns’ does not!” he announced.

“But there is a remedy for that,” Hugo interjected loftly, so softly that everybody looked at him.  “Why, all the conscripts of the army for two years could take a vow not to marry,” he said.  “We could reduce the output, as your father’s factory does when the market is dull.  We should not have so many babies.  This would be cheaper than rearing them to be slaughtered in their young manhood.”