“I fancy,” said March, “that there was a great deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it.  We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations.”  He found himself saying this in Dryfoos’s behalf; the old man looked at him gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.

Lindau turned his head toward him and said:  “You are righdt, Passil; you are righdt.  I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of human paseness—­chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte.  I haf zeen men in the face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as—­as pusiness motifes.”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “it would be a grand thing for ‘Every Other Week’ if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series.  It would make a lot of talk.”

Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, “I think, Major Lindau—­”

“High brifate; prefet gorporal,” the old man interrupted, in rejection of the title.

Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau, “Brevet corporal is good.”

Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke.  “I think Mr. Lindau is right.  Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less frequent on ours.  We were fighting more immediately for existence.  We were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that if each were not for all, then none was for any.”

The colonel’s words made their impression.  Dryfoos said, with authority, “That is so.”

“Colonel Woodburn,” Fulkerson called out, “if you’ll work up those ideas into a short paper—­say, three thousand words—­I’ll engage to make March take it.”

The colonel went on without replying:  “But Mr. Lindau is right in characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon’s mouth as no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible that he could have used.  I was very much struck by it.”

The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that no effort sufficed to dislodge him.  The dinner went on from course to course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to bring the talk back to ‘Every Other Week.’  But perhaps because that was only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to bring a number of men together under Dryfoos’s roof, and make them the witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth, Fulkerson’s attempts failed.  The colonel showed how commercialism was the poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple, agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct, divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had flung off,