A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton

Campton sat with his friend Dastrey in the latter's pleasant little _entresol_ full of Chinese lacquer and Venetian furniture.

Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an attack of rheumatism; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry of War. The friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating across lustrous cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding of slender consoles.

On the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and listened.

"It always comes back to the same thing," Campton was saying nervously. "What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?"

Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant's visit, he had turned over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt of hers?

Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have submitted such a problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the front in such a frenzy of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard service in _Postes de Secours_ and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those few months had matured and mellowed him more than a lifetime of Paris.

He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend's difficulty.

"I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble kind of job that I've been assigned to, you've no right _not_ to try to keep your boy out of it if you can?"

"Well-by any honourable means."

Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. "The word's not happy, I admit."

"I wasn't thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see," said Dastrey smiling, "we'd taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I've been on the edge of what's going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their meaning, and I'm not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours. " He mused a moment, and then went on: "What would George's view be?"

Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the chance of explaining that George's view, thank God, had remained perfectly detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice of his being mixed up in the thing at all.

But how could he say this now? If George's view were still what his father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized man could afford to stand aside from such a conflict.

"As far as I know," he said, "George hasn't changed his mind."

Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the ceiling.

"Whereas _you_ -- " Dastrey suggested.

"Yes," said Campton. "I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been in contact with what's going on out there. But how can anybody _not_ be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you-or those books over there, when you turn to them after your day's work? Perhaps they do, because you've got a real job, a job you've been ordered to do, and can't not do. But for a useless drifting devil like me-my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!"

"There are a good many people who wouldn't call you useless, Mr. Campton," said Boylston.

Campton shook his head. "I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I'm doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your kind. " (Boylston laughed.) "Service is of no use without conviction: that's one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where I'm not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That's why -- " he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey's friendly gaze: "That's why I respect George's opinion, which really consists in not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one's individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman's scream at an accident she isn't in."

Even while he spoke, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: "Every one can at least contribute an attitude: as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston's here to confirm it."