pinned him to the wall and attempted to frighten him into conceding a moral advantage to which, as every boy within earshot knew, Skinny had not the slightest right. "Am I a liar? Am I a liar?" Skinny had reiterated with idiotic insistence. "Yes, you are," Paul had truthfully replied, and his valour had merely earned him a bloody nose.
He was strangely perturbed by this issue and pondered it long after his talk with Otto. Among other difficult points, just what did "country" mean? There might be bad kings and good kings, but surely a country was only land occupied by a collection of people, good and bad mixed! Suppose all the people in France went to live in Germany, and all the people in Germany went to live in France. Would the fact of their being on French soil make Germans bad, or would the advent of Germans make French soil good? He feared there was some terrible fallacy at the base of Otto's contentions.
Moreover, if France and England were bad, how could such splendid books be written in London and Paris? Englishmen and Germans must be very much alike. Otto should realize that, after having been two years on a British ship.
More than ever Paul felt he must see all countries at close range, giving a wide berth to reefs of national prejudice, which was too like the clannish braggadoccio of the schoolyard. He had once heard Skinny Wiggins boasting to Mark Laval, "Aw, you dirty Canuck, my father can do your father, one hand tied behind his back!" Mark, in point of fact, had forthwith blacked Skinny's eye, and Might, for once, had been Right.
However Otto might reflect the conscriptive policy of European diplomats, the worst enemy of his fatherland could not have taken offence at any act of his. Chips, for all his anti-German bias, never hesitated to supply Otto with wood and tools for his "models," while Fritz, a
