"If you call war a game."
"What is it?"
"It's about the most serious business there is, fighting."
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
"Why is fighting more serious than anything else?" she asked.
"You either kill or get killed—and I suppose it is serious enough, killing."
"But when you're dead you don't matter any more," she said.
He was silenced for a moment.
"But the result matters," he said. "It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not."
"Not to you—nor me—we don't care about Khartoum."
"You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room."
"But I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara—do you?" she replied, laughing with antagonism.
"I don't—but we've got to back up those who do."
"Why have we?"
"Where is the nation if we don't?"
"But we aren't the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation."
"They might say they weren't either."
"Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation. But I should still be myself," she asserted brilliantly.
"You wouldn't be yourself if there were no nation."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd just be a prey to everybody and anybody."
"How a prey?"
"They'd come and take everything you'd got."
"Well, they couldn't take much even then. I don't care what they take. I'd rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire who gave me everything you can buy."
"That's because you are a romanticist."
"Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go away, and people just living in the houses. It's all so stiff and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really?"
"I would fight for the nation."
"For all that, you aren't the nation. What would you do for yourself?"
