I will confess I have never yet tried over these more elaborate developments of Little Wars, partly because of the limited time at my disposal, and partly because they all demand a number of players who are well acquainted with the same on each side if they are not to last interminably.  The Battle of Hook’s Farm (one player a side) took a whole afternoon, and most of my battles have lasted the better part of a day.

VI

ENDING WITH A SORT OF CHALLENGE

I could go on now and tell of battles, copiously.  In the memory of the one skirmish I have given I do but taste blood.  I would like to go on, to a large, thick book.  It would be an agreeable task.  Since I am the chief inventor and practiser (so far) of Little Wars, there has fallen to me a disproportionate share of victories.  But let me not boast.  For the present, I have done all that I meant to do in this matter.  It is for you, dear reader, now to get a floor, a friend, some soldiers and some guns, and show by a grovelling devotion your appreciation of this noble and beautiful gift of a limitless game that I have given you.

And if I might for a moment trumpet!  How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing!  Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist.  Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—­and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.  This world is for ample living; we want security and freedom; all of us in every country, except a few dull-witted, energetic bores, want to see the manhood of the world at something better than apeing the little lead toys our children buy in boxes.  We want fine things made for mankind—­ splendid cities, open ways, more knowledge and power, and more and more and more—­and so I offer my game, for a particular as well as a general end; and let us put this prancing monarch and that silly scare-monger, and these excitable “patriots,” and those adventurers, and all the practitioners of Welt Politik, into one vast Temple of War, with cork carpets everywhere, and plenty of little trees and little houses to knock down, and cities and fortresses, and unlimited soldiers—­tons, cellars-full—­and let them lead their own lives there away from us.