Hubbard, L. Ron Read Free Page A

ago, had died of grief and starvation in the wreckage which had been London.
    When he was eighteen he had been sent to the front as a subaltern. At twenty-three he was commanding a brigade.
    In short, his career was not unlike that of any other high-born English lad born after the beginning of that conflict which is sometimes known as the War of Books-or the War of Creeds, or the War Which Ended War or World Wars two, three, four and five. Like any other, with the exception that he lived through it.
    There is little accounting for the reason he lived so long, and, having lived, moved up to take the spotlight on the Continental stage for a few seconds out of time. But there is never any accounting for such things.
    When officers and men, sick with the hell of it, walked out to find a bullet that would end an unlivable life, he shrugged and carried on. When his messmates went screaming mad from illness and revulsion, he gave them that for which they begged, sheathed his pistol and took over the fragments of their commands. When, outfits mutinied and shot their officers in the back, he squared his own and, faced front, carried on.
    He had seen ninety-three thousand replacements come into his division before he had been a year on the Continent. And he had seen almost as many files voided over again.
    He was a soldier and his trade was death, and he had seen too much to be greatly impressed with anything. Outwardly he was much like half a million others of his rank; inwardly there was a difference. He had found out, while commanding ack-acks in England, that nerves are more deadly than bullets, and so he had early denied the existence of his own, substituting a careless cheerfulness which went strangely with the somber gloom which overhung the graveyard of Europe. If he had nerves, he kept them to himself. And what battles he fought within himself to keep them down must forever go unsung.
    Before he had been a year on the Continent, the dread soldier's sickness-that very learned and scientific result of bacteriological warfare, the climax of years of mutating germs unto final, incurable diseases-had caused a quarantine to be placed on all English troops serving across the Channel, just as America, nine years before, had completely stopped all communication across the Atlantic, shortly after her abortive atom war had boomeranged. Hence, he had not been able to return to England.
    If he longed for his own land, shell-blasted though it might be, he never showed it. Impassively he had listened each time to the tidings of seven separate revolutions which had begun with the assassination of the king, a crime which had been succeeded by every known kind of political buffoonery culminating in Communism (for at least that is what they called this ideology, though Marx would have disowned it. And the late, unlamented Stalin would have gibbered incoherently at the heresy of its tenets). And he saw only mirth in the fact that, whereas the crimson banner flew now over London, the imperial standard of the czar now whipped in the Russian breeze.
    Seven separate governments, each attacked and made to carry on the war.
    Nine governments in Germany in only eighteen years. He had let the ribbons and insignia issued him drop into the mud, wishing with all his kind that all governments would collapse together and put an end to this. But that had never happened. The fall of one side netted attack from the organized other. And turn about. just as the problem of manufacture had unequalized the periods of bombing, so had this served to prolong this war that the brief orgy of atomics, murderously wild, if utterly indecisive, had spread such hatreds that the lingering sparks of decency and forbearance seemed to have vanished from the world. War, as in days of old, had become a thing of hate and loot, for how else was a machine-tooled country to get machines and tools which it could no longer generate within itself.
    He knew nothing about these international