But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past.

He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles.

There was a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever.
From his home his youthful eyes had looked upon the war in his own country with distrust.

It must be some sort of a play affair.

He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle.