Let us return for a moment to the young medic and dwell on him. He is, as I say, that beautiful thing, the perfect neutral. He fights not, neither does he build the bridge. He won’t even participate in ceremonies attending the opening of the bridge. He is above the battle; he has clean hands; he s an Observer. He says so, to Guinness, several times over, to which his poor colonel is only allowed to reply: “You’re a good doctor, Jones” — Smith? Naismith? No-namesmith? the blank is significant — “but you’ve got a lot to learn about the army.” What I shall say now is purely personal, private, and bigoted, indeed absurd, but whenever I heard young Naismith saying “Madness! Madness!” as I stared through that windshield, I kept seeing in his place the scared simian face of young Albie X, whom I once went to camp with and later heard tell me there was nothing ever worth fighting for, he had seen some movies of planes blown clean into dust as soon as a bullet hit them, and later still was encountered for the last time at a cocktail party on 55th Street, now a British ambulance driver back on furlough from Africa, still telling me, with a defeated smirk I cannot communicate on paper, that there was nothing, just nothing, ever worth fighting for. Soon after he became a homosexual. I said that this was going to be bigoted and absurd.