We kill them.

We shot them.

We aint got to.

What’ll we plan?

No we haven’t Jim.

You know we got to.

“Yes, we,” said Maera.

We kill them all right.

What was that word we⁠—

“We, I suppose,” I said.

We talked for a long time.

We were in a garden in Mons.

We had a good trip together.

We walked through the garden.

We were going to the Champagne.

“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.

“We have good whisky anyway,” he said.

We all looked⁠—the knuckle was black and blue.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him.

They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards.

“Here’s all the ones we missed A. J.,” said Jim and downed his liquor.

We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whisky and soda.

The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be⁠—will be utterly submerged.

The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.

We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.

“We kill the savage’s bulls, and the drunkard’s bulls, and the riau-riau dancer’s bulls.”

We were fifty kilometers from the front, but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen.

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out.”

We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea.

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.