52 / COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
At first opportunity Frank seized the paper and read the feature hungrily, drinking in its jingoistic prose, his eyes glowing eerily. "Daddy, I want to go!" he said as he laid the paper down rever- ently on the table. Fee's head jerked around as she slopped stew all over the top of the stove, and Paddy stiffened in his Windsor chair, his book for- gotten. "You're too young, Frank," he said. "No, I'm not! I'm seventeen, Daddy, I'm a man! Why should the Huns and Turks slaughter our men like pigs while I'm sitting here safe and sound? It's more than time a Cleary did his bit." "You're under age, Frank, they won't take you." "They will if you don't object," Frank countered quickly, his dark eyes fixed on Paddy's face. "But I do object. You're the only one working at the moment and we need the money you bring in, you know that." "But I'll be paid in the army!" Paddy laughed. "The 'soldier's shilling' eh? Being a blacksmith in Wahine pays a lot better than being a soldier in Europe." "But I'll be over there, maybe I'll get the chance to be something better than a blacksmith! It's my only way out, Daddy." "Nonsense! Good God, boy, you don't know what you're saying. War is terrible. I come from a country that's been at war for a thousand years, so I know what I'm saying. Haven't you heard the Boer War chaps talking? You go into Wahine often enough, so next time listen. And anyway, it strikes me that the blasted English use Anzacs as fodder for the enemy guns, putting them into places where they don't want to waste their own precious troops. Look at the way that saber-rattling Churchill sent our men into something as useless as Gallipoli! Ten thousand killed out of fifty thousand! Twice as bad as decimation. THE THORN BIRDS / 53
"Why should you go fighting old Mother England's wars for her? What has she ever done for you, except bleed her colonies white? If you went to England they'd look down their noses at you for being a colonial. En Zed isn't in any danger, nor is Australia. It might do old Mother England the world of good to be defeated; it's more than time someone paid her for what she's done to Ire- land. I certainly wouldn't weep any tears if the Kaiser ended up marching down the Strand." "But Daddy, I want to enlist!" "You can want all you like, Frank, but you aren't going, so you may as well forget the whole idea. You're not big enough to be a soldier." Frank's face flushed, his lips came together; his lack of stature was a very sore point with him. At school he had always been the smallest boy in his class, and fought twice as many battles as anyone else because of it. Of late a terrible doubt had begun to invade his being, for at seventeen he was exactly the same five feet three he had been at fourteen; perhaps he had stopped growing. Only he knew the agonies to which he subjected his body and his spirit, the stretching, the exercises, the fruitless hoping. Smithying had given him a strength out of all proportion to his height, however; had Paddy consciously chosen a profession for someone of Frank's temperament, he could not have chosen better. A small structure of pure power, at seventeen he had never been defeated in a fight and was already famous throughout the Taranaki peninsula. All his anger, frustration and inferiority came into a fight with him, and they were more than the biggest, strongest local could contend with, allied as they were to a body in superb physical condition, an excellent brain, viciousness and indomitable will. The bigger and tougher they were, the more Frank wanted to see them humbled in the dust. His peers trod a wide detour around him, for his aggressiveness was