'I am an alien,' Lavendale replied, watching a troop of recruits pass by.
The sergeant looked him up and down and sighed.
'America's a country, begging your pardon, sir, that don't seem to have much stomach for fighting,' he remarked, as the young man passed on.
Lavendale crossed the street with a slight frown upon his forehead. He made his way to the War Office and found Captain Merrill in his room alone. The two men exchanged the greetings of intimate friends.
'Say, Reggie,' Lavendale began, 'you folks are getting kind of nervy, aren't you? A recruiting sergeant in Trafalgar Square has just gently intimated to me that I belong to a country which has no stomach for fighting.'
Merrill grinned as he tossed his cigarette case over.
'Well,' he remarked, 'you don't seem to be exactly spoiling for the fray, do you?'
'Look here,' he said, 'it's all very well for you fellows to talk. You've got the war fever in your blood. You're in it deep yourselves and there's a sort of gloomy satisfaction in seeing every one else in the same box. The chap who goes out to provoke a fight is worse, of course, but the one who springs up and reaches for his gun at the first chance of joining in, is playing his game, isn't he?'
'Perhaps you are right,' Merrill admitted.
'I'm not telling you or any one else exactly what my opinion is about America's policy,' Lavendale continued. 'I'll only remind you that, even when those truculent forefathers of ours went out to fight, they stopped to put on their armour. Is there anything fresh?'
'I don't know,' was the somewhat doubtful reply. 'There is a queer sort of feeling of apprehension everywhere this morning. The Chief's been round to see the Prime Minister and on to the Admiralty. There's a rumour that he went round to Buckingham Palace, too. Looks as though there were something up.'
'You know all about it, I suppose,' Lavendale remarked quietly.
The young American knocked the ash from his cigarette.
'The history of this war,' he went on, 'will make mighty interesting reading, but there's another history, a history that will never be written, the history of the unrecorded things. Gee, that would make people gossip if they could get hold of only a few chapters of it! You know there's something strange afoot, Reggie. So do I, though we sit here lying to one another. I doubt whether the man in the street will ever know.'