Alone By Norman Douglas













































































 -  That is the way to touch their
hearts. The offering was repeated at convenient intervals. 

A little item in the - Page 51
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That Is The Way To Touch Their Hearts.

The offering was repeated at convenient intervals.

A little item in the newspaper led to some talk, one morning, about the war. I found she shared the view common to many others, that this is an "interested" war. Society has organized itself on new lines, lines which work against peace. There are so many persons "interested" in keeping up the present state of affairs, people who now make more money than they ever made before. Everybody has a finger in the pie. The soldier in the field, the chief person concerned, is voiceless and of no account when compared with this army of civilians, every one of whom would lose, if the war came to an end. They will fight like demons, to keep the fun going. What else should they do? Their income is at stake. A man's heart is in his purse.

I asked:

"Supposing, Madame, you desired to end the war, how would you set about it?"

Whereupon a delightfully Tuscan idea occurred to her.

"I think I would abolish this Red-Cross nonsense. It makes things too pleasant. It would bring the troops to their senses and cause them to march home and say: Basta! We have had enough."

"Don't you find the Germans a little prepotenti?" "Prepotenti: yes. By all means let us break their heads. And then, caro Lei, let us learn to imitate them...."

That afternoon, I remember, being wondrously fine and myself in such mellow mood that I would have shared my last crust with some shipwrecked archduchess and almost forgiven mine enemies, though not until I had hit them back - I strolled about the Cascine. They have done something to make this place attractive; just then, at all events, the shortcomings were unobserved amid the burst of green things overhead and underfoot. Originally it must have been an unpromising stretch of land, running, as it does, in a dead level along the Arno. Yet there is earth and water; and a good deal can be done with such materials to diversify the surface. More might have been accomplished here. For in the matter of hill and dale and lake, and variety of vegetation, the Cascine are not remarkable. One calls to mind what has been attained at Kew Gardens in an identical situation, and with far less sunshine for the landscape gardener to play with. One thinks of a certain town in Germany where, on a plain as flat as a billiard table, they actually reared a mountain, now covered with houses and timber, for the disport of the citizens. To think that I used to skate over the meadows where that mountain now stands!

There was no horse-racing in the Cascine that afternoon; nothing but the usual football. The pastime is well worth a glance, if only for the sake of sympathizing with the poor referee. Several hundred opprobrious epithets are hurled at his head in the course of a single game, and play is often suspended while somebody or other hotly disputes his decision and refuses to be guided any longer by his perverse interpretation of the rules.

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