He called Pye to mind, the Pye of those days, the happy Pye on his pet subject. He was a small, dark, powerful man who, once each week, would make an address, it might be in the middle of a lecture on elementary hydraulics, but always in roughly the following muddled terms.

“I don’t hold with the necessity of the AFS,” he would say, “because I don’t hold with the necessity for war. But our parents didn’t ask us if we wanted to be born, they couldn’t ask me or any of you. When I got to an age when I could use my mental processes, I found I had grown to be a man in a world other men had made to their own advantage. Now, I have fought all my life to improve conditions in this job through the Fire Brigade’s Union, though it’s done me no good with what they once described to me here as ‘the powers that be.’ And what I’m getting at is this. We find ourselves in the condition that the right to live, or what is the same thing, the right to work, is put into the melting pot for the gain of a few. But if we do have a war, and mind you I’m not saying we shall ’ave, or that we ought to, because I don’t think anything need be settled by killing innocent men, or their wives and families, then I say that there must be something like an AFS organisation. But I don’t hold with it.”

“No, that’s right,” an old recruit called Piper would say at this point, nodding his head. This man echoed, or put in a few words to shew that he agreed, whenever the instructor drew breath, or paused to disentangle the thoughts that rose like magic bean stalks in his head.

“Now there’s many downstairs,” Pye would go on, referring to his fellow firemen, “that don’t like the idea of your coming into the Job. They think it may come to an attack on the conditions they exist under. Take a fireman’s wage, it’s not an abundance. But as I say to them in the messroom below, we can’t expect to deal with the fires that may be started as a result of war action, not on our bloody own we can’t. Yet some of them are like that, they’ll hardly speak to a lad until he’s three years out of the drill class, till he’s been three years a fireman. And they’re the kind who think this war, if there is one, will be like the last. I think they’re mistaken. And I like to take an interest, I’m not afraid of new faces as some are, even educated men. My father could not give me a better or worse education than what many of you have, but I like to meet strangers, I take the position they may teach me something I don’t know. Still there’s a prejudice against you lads, you might as well know, it’s only fair to you. And yet there’s many like me have said right along that we in the Brigade must make the best of it with all of you which I’m bound to say I don’t think necessary, because war is not an alternative, not with civilised human beings, or shouldn’t be.”