I had to take a
job as secretary to a man I couldn't respect, and now... Well, if I can
get a bit of my own back by defrauding the government or classing
myself with the unorganised leeches on Society, nothing I know is going
to stop my doing it!"
Phinuit knocked the ashes out of a cold pipe at which he had been
sucking for some time, rose, and stretched.
"The worst of it is," he said in a serious turn--"I mean, looking at
the thing from my bourgeois viewpoint of 1914--the War, but more
particularly the antics of the various governments after the War,
turned out several million of men in my frame of mind the world over.
We went into the thing deluded by patriotic bunk and the promise that
it was a war to end war; we came out to find the old men more firmly
entrenched in the seats of the mighty than ever and stubbornly bent on
perpetuating precisely the same rotten conditions that make wars
inevitable. What Germany did to the treaty that guaranteed Belgium's
neutrality was child's-play compared to what the governments of the
warring nations have done to their covenants with their own people.
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