They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly, on Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease (but rather less than more) in Stephen’s study.

They had asked each other:  “Are you going to fight for your country?”

And Ellis had said he was damned if he’d fight for his country; and Mitchell had said he hadn’t got a country, so there was no point in his fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could show him a country that cared for the arts before anything he’d fight for it; but that England was very far from being that country.

And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.

And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not listening to what was said.

And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral.  Michael said to himself that he could stand these massed war emotions if they were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral who had never cared a damn about either before the War.

Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired whether Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral?

Michael shrugged his shoulders.  “Why bother,” he said, “about Rheims Cathedral and Louvain?  From your point of view it’s all right.  If Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the enemy’s artillery they’ve got to go.  They didn’t happen to be in the way of ours, that’s all.”

Michael’s mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its malady.  He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of the Allies and to justify the acts of Germany.

“It’s up to the French to defend Paris.  And what have we got to do with Alsace-Lorraine?  As if every inteligent Frenchman didn’t know that Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt.  No.  I’m not pro-German.  I simply see things as they are.”

“I think,” Frances would say placably, “we’d better not talk about the War.”

He would remind them that it was not his subject.

And John laughed at him.  “Poor old Nick hates the War because it’s dished him.  He knows his poems can’t come out till it’s over.”

As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.

After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris.  As Stephen pointed out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael.  In magnificent defiance of the enemy, the “New Poems” of Michael Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as forthcoming in October; and Morton Ellis’s “Eccentricities,” with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month.  Even Wadham’s poems would come out some time, perhaps next spring.

Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War Office as posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the morale of the Allied Armies.  “If England could afford to publish Michael—­”