“How long has your organisation taken to build up?” Julian enquired.

“Exactly three months,” David Sands observed, turning around in his swing chair from the desk at which he had been writing.  “The scheme was started a few days after your article in the British Review.  We took your motto as our text `Coordination and cooperation.’”

They found their way into the clubroom, and at luncheon, later on, Julian strove to improve his acquaintance with the men who were seated around him.  Some of them were Members of Parliament with well-known names, others were intensely local, but all seemed earnest and clear-sighted.  Phineas Cross commenced to talk about war generally.  He had just returned from a visit with other Labour Members to the front, although it is doubtful whether the result had been exactly in accordance with the intentions of the powers who had invited him.

“I’ll tell you something about war,” he said, “which contradicts most every other experience.  There’s scarcely a great subject in the world which you don’t have to take as a whole, and from the biggest point of view, to appreciate it thoroughly.  It’s exactly different with war.  If you want to understand more than the platitudes, you want to just take in one section of the fighting.  Say there are fifty Englishmen, decent fellows, been dragged from their posts as commercial travellers or small tradesmen or labourers or what-not, and they get mixed up with a similar number of Germans.  Those Germans ain’t the fiends we read about.  They’re not bubbling over with militarism.  They don’t want to lord it over all the world.  They’ve exactly the same tastes, the same outlook upon life as the fifty Englishmen whom an iron hand has been forcing to do their best to kill.  Those English chaps didn’t want to kill anybody, any more than the Germans did.  They had to do it, too, simply because it was part of the game.  There was a handful of German prisoners I saw, talking with their guard and exchanging smokes.  One was a barber in a country town.  The man who had him in tow was an English barber.  Bless you, they were talking like one o’clock!  That German barber didn’t want anything in life except plenty to eat and drink, to be a good husband and good father, and to save enough money to buy a little house of his own.  The Englishman was just the same.  He’d as soon have had that German for a pal for a day’s fishing or a walk in the country, as any one else.  They’d neither of them got anything against the other.  Where the hell is this spirit of hatred?  You go down the line, mile after mile, and most little groups of men facing one another are just the same.  Here and there, there’s some bitter feeling, through some fighting that’s seemed unfair, but that’s nothing.  The fact remains that those millions of men don’t hate one another, that they’ve got nothing to hate one another about, and they’re being driven to slaughter one another like savage beasts.  For what?  Mr. Stenson might supply an answer.  Your great editors might.  Your great Generals could be glib about it.  They could spout volumes of words, but there’s no substance about them.  I say that in this generation there’s no call for fighting, and there didn’t ought to be any.”