Chapter VII: Part 7

For a time he was jolted out of his rut by his transfer to France in the August of 1916. He was drafted out, at a few hours' notice, with a batch of men destined for clerical duties, and found himself planted in a small French town round which camps were spreading in a fringe of tent and hutment, and where house after house was being rapidly annexed for the service of the British Army. But, save for change of scene and country, the new rut into which he had been jolted was twin to his old rut in England. It was the same clerk's life--this time in the office of a military department--but with longer and more irregular hours than fall to the lot of the ordinary civilian clerk, and with restrictions on personal freedom unknown since his days in the City. The Army kept him as tightly as his strait-laced mother; demanded as regular hours and refused, as steadfastly as she had done, to let him wander o' nights.

He filed, he copied, he ate his rations--and from the beaten track of his everyday life, the war seemed very far away. Sometimes in his off-hours, afternoon or evening, he would tramp up the hills that held the little town as in a cup to a point where, looking eastward, he could see the sudden flashes of the guns. The bright, fierce flashes in the evening sky were war, real war made visible and wickedly beautiful; such war as he had seen in the Ardennes village, and such as he had dreamed of fighting when he first donned his khaki tunic. And instead a chair and a typewriter in the Rue Ernest Dupont, the papers to be filed that a girl might have filed, the round of safe and disciplined monotony. That was war as he knew it: an office with flashes in the distance.

For a few days after his arrival in France his new surroundings interested him--the cobbled roads, the build of the houses, the sound of French in the streets; but once their strangeness had worn off he accepted and ceased to notice them. He was not sufficiently educated, sufficiently imaginative or observant, to take at anything beyond their face-value the various and incongruous types of humanity with which he was brought into contact. The strange life of Northern France affected him only where it touched him personally, and to him the sight of a turbaned brown trooper bargaining in the market-place with a swift-spoken, bare-headed Frenchwoman was an oddity and nothing more; just as the flamboyant facade of the great church of St. Nicholas was an oddity, a building unlike, in its mass and its detail of statuary, to the churches he knew of in London. He came across many such oddities--and having no meaning for him, they made but a passing impression. After a week or two he no longer turned his head at the sight of a gang of Annamite labourers or the passing of a detachment of heavy-booted German prisoners marched campwards at the end of their day; these things, like the ambulances crawling in a convoy from the station, like the shuttered French houses built squarely round courtyards, became part of the background of his daily life and he ceased to wonder or reflect on them. Perhaps his contact with alien races, with strange buildings and habits once unknown, may have increased his vague sense of the impossibility of fitting all men to one pattern, and of solving the problems of human misgovernment and government by means of the simple and sweeping expedients he had once been so glib in upholding; but on the whole it left him unaffected because little interested. His course of Free Library reading had placed him in possession of certain scattered facts concerning France, facts dealing chiefly with the First Napoleon and the German War of 1870; but for all the hot interest they had stirred in him once, they gave him small insight into the forces that had gone to the making of the country in which his life was spent wearily. He was lacking entirely in the historical sense, the sense that makes dead men alive; thus, in connection with the doings of present-day Frenchmen, his odds and ends of historical reading had little more meaning to him than the Late Gothic carving on the ornate portal of St. Nicholas.

* * * * *

The phase of warfare with which France familiarized him was not only secure and uneventful; as far as the native was concerned it was likewise prosperous. The town where he plodded through his daily toil was blessed as never before in the matter of trade and turnover; commercially it blossomed and bore good fruit in the deadly shade of the upas tree. The camps and the offices meant custom to its citizens, and, whatever the toll in the blood of its sons, it gained in its pocket by the war. The Germans, in 1914, had threatened but barely entered it; it had neither damage to repair nor extorted indemnity to recoup, and money flowed freely to the palms of its inhabitants from the pockets of the British soldier. Its neighbours, a few miles away, lay in hopeless ruin, their industries annihilated, their inhabitants scattered, their very outlines untraceable--beaten to death by that same chance of war which had spared the city in the cup of the hills and exalted her financial horn. Here were neither misery nor shell-holes; the local shopkeeper was solidly content, the local innkeeper banked cheerfully and often, the local farmer sold his produce to advantage and the volume of trade in the district expanded and burst new channels. Eating-houses broke out into English announcements concerning eggs, fried potatoes, and vegetables; English newspapers were plentiful as French in the shops and small boys cried them in the streets; and when the weekly market gathered in the shadow of St. Nicholas, to the stalls for hardware, fruit and cheap finery were added the stalls that did a roaring business in "souvenirs" for the English markets.

* * * * *

His days were steadfastly regular and steadfastly monotonous. Each morning by half-past eight he was seated in the office in the Rue Ernest Dupont; in a roomy house, most provincially French, built round a paved courtyard and entered from the street by an archway. A projecting board at the side of the archway bore the accumulation of letters which denoted the department by which the house had been annexed, and on the door of the room where William laboured was the legend "Letters and Enquiries." At half-past twelve he knocked off for dinner and was his own master till three; then the office again till supper and after supper--with good luck till ten, with bad luck indefinite overtime. On Sundays he was his own master for the space of an afternoon, and now and again there were parades and now and again the "late pass" that entitled to an evening at liberty. When he first arrived he was fed and roofed in one of the camps on the borders of the little city; later, with half-a-dozen fellows, he slept and messed in the upper rooms of the building in which he did his daily work.... It was a life of bleak order and meticulous, safe regularity, poles apart from his civilian forecast of the doings of a man of war. There was small thrill of personal danger about its soldiering; the little city at the "Front" was far less exposed to the malice of enemies than London or the East Coast of England: and almost the only indication of possible peril was the occasional printed notice displayed in a citizen's window to the effect that within was a cellar "at the disposition of the public in case of alarm"--from aircraft. Once or twice during the first year that William dwelt there the anti-aircraft section grew clamorous on its hills and spat loudly at specks in the blue--which, after a few minutes, receded to the east while the city settled down without injury. The men in the town and quartered in the camps outside it were for the most part office-workers, men of the A.S.C., of Labour companies or Veterinary service; to whom the monotony of daily existence was a deadlier foe than the German.

* * * * *

His life had been unusually clean; partly, no doubt, from inclination to cleanliness, but partly through influence of circumstance. While his mother lived he had small opportunity for dissipation even of the mildest variety; and hard on her death had come the great new interests which his friendship with Faraday opened to him. Those interests had been so engrossing that he had little energy to spare from them; all his hopes and pleasures were bound up in his "causes," and the very violence of his political enthusiasms had saved him from physical temptation. Thus he had come to Griselda heart-whole and sound, and, even when his causes and his wife were lost, the habit of years still clung to him and the follies that came easily to others would have needed an effort in him.

Once or twice, in the soddenness of his discontent, he was tempted to turn to the gross pleasures of drink and worse in which others found distraction from their dullness; but the temptation was never an urgent one and there was no great merit in his resistance. One night he overdrank himself in a deliberate attempt at forgetfulness--whereupon he was violently sick, crawled to bed throbbing with headache, and did not repeat the experience.

He felt himself drifting mentally, and, to his credit, made efforts to save himself; tried to awaken an interest in the French language, bought a dictionary and phrase-book and attended bi-weekly classes in a neighbouring Y.M.C.A. hut. He spent a certain amount of his leisure in the Y.M.C.A. hut; borrowing books from its library, listening to its concerts, and now and again making one at a game of draughts. He made no real friends--probably because he was not in the mood for making any; with his comrades of the office he got on well enough, but there was no such tie between him and them as had existed between him and the men of his mess in the days when he first donned his uniform. The hope deferred that had sickened his heart had driven him in upon himself; then his desk-work was obviously well within his powers and outwardly there was nothing about him to call for special sympathy and kindliness. His fellows mostly looked on him as a harmless, uncompanionable chap who preferred to be left to himself.

* * * * *

By degrees William Tully was moulded to the narrow little life departmental and lived through its duties and hours of leisure taking not much thought for the morrow; in the Rue Ernest Dupont the war seemed much smaller, much farther away, than it had seemed at home in England, and, absorbed in its minor machinery, he could no longer consider it as a whole. The office and the daily details of the office, the companions he worked with, disliked and liked, loomed larger in his eyes than the crash of armies or the doings of men at the front. As a civilian he had wrestled with strategy and pored over maps; as a soldier of England he could not see the wood for the trees. And if he did not fall mentally to the level of that species of surgeon to whom war is an agency for the provision of interesting cases, it was merely because, unlike the surgeon, he had little enthusiasm for his work.

Inevitably, with the passing of month after month, the memory of Griselda grew less poignant; and with the soothing of his sense of loss there came about, also inevitably, a cooling of his fury for instant and personal revenge. He had not forgiven and would never forget, but he no longer agonized at his helplessness to strike a blow; in part, perhaps, because the discipline under which he lived had weakened his power of initiative. Though he chafed under discipline he learned to depend on it and became accustomed to the daily ordering of his life; and his early training in the insurance office stood him in good stead, so that he performed his duties with the necessary efficiency and smartness.... What remained with him, long after the memory of his dead wife had ceased to be an ever-present wound, was the sense of having been fooled by he knew not whom, of having been trapped and held by false pretences. The fact that his grievance was vague did not lessen its bitterness; it lay too deep for the grousing that he heard from others, and for the most he nursed it in silence, the silence of smouldering rebellion.

There were moments when his face must have been more communicative than his tongue; for one Sunday, an early spring Sunday as he sat on a hill above the town and stared vaguely at the skyline, a man addressed him with, "Are you feeling like that, mate?" and squatted on the grass beside him: a lean young man with a worn brown face--deeply lined on the forehead and with eyes, like a sailor's, accustomed to looking at distances.

"I'm like it myself," he went on without waiting for an answer, and stretched himself out on to his elbow. "These last few days it's been almost beyond holding in; it's the spring, I suppose, the good road weather and the sun. I don't mind it so much when there's mud and the country doesn't grin at you; I can stand it well enough then."

Lying stretched on his elbow he began to talk about himself. He was English-born and he had begun his career at a desk--staying there just long enough to save up his fare and a few pounds to start him in Canada. After that came a farm--to his thinking but a shade less narrow than the office; to be left for the rolling, the shifting life, the only life worth living. He had had his ups, he had had his downs--but always with his eyes on the distance. Ten fine years of it, American, African, Australian; the life independent where you shouldered your pack and gave men the go-by when you were sick of them. And then, in the summer of 1914, a fancy to see the Old Country. He had worked his passage homeward in a short-handed tramp and arrived at Tilbury on the day the Kaiser's government sent its ultimatum to Russia. Four days later he was a soldier in the British Army, and a year or so later had a knee-cap damaged and a shoulder put out of action. They had patched him up carefully, made quite a decent job of him, and he walked and moved his left arm with comfort; but, adjudged unfit for the fighting line, he had done with the trenches for good. Permanent base now, with a cushy job at the office of the D.D. of Works. Filing and copying documents relating to hut construction; he had been fool enough to let out that he had had some small training as a clerk.

"In a way," he said, chewing at a long blade of grass, "it's a good thing I've got my stiff knee. If I could put the miles under me as I used to, I believe--I believe I'd go. It would come over me and I'd go. Not that I want to desert, but it might be too strong for me; I've always been my own master and I've always wanted to know what was on the other side of the hill. Straight on"--he pointed southward--"straight on, anywhere. The road--if you've once tramped it" ... He broke off and stared with his eyes on the distance and beyond it.

After a minute or two of silence he asked William suddenly what had made him join the Army; and William gave him confidence for confidence, attracted he knew not why. The man's craving for loneliness and bodily exertion was something he could not understand; but they were on common ground in their mutual rebellion against the weariness of daily life. They talked with long silences in between their speech, telling out their hearts to each other; or rather finding in each other's presence an excuse for speaking their hearts. Later it seemed odd to William that though they spoke freely of their lives and their griefs it had never struck either of them to ask of the other his name.

"So you joined up because of your wife," said the man who lay on his elbow.

"Yes," William answered him, "I thought----" He did not finish the sentence; it wearied him now to remember what he had thought.

"Sometimes," the other broke the silence, "I ask myself why I joined up. Don't see how it could have been patriotism; England hadn't been anything to me for years. My sister died soon after I left it and I hadn't any one else. So far as I can make out it never was much to me; I was always unhappy in England, hated school and office and towns--I lived in a town. Never knew what life could be till I got away from it. Say the Germans had won and dominated the earth! They wouldn't have dominated my earth. I could always have made myself a camp-fire where they wouldn't have wanted to follow me. If they'd sacked London and swallowed up New York I could have lain out under the stars at night and laughed at 'em. So what made me? ... Some say man's a fighting animal."

He pulled a fresh grass-blade to chew and rolled over on his chest till his chin rested on his hands.

"I knew I should hate soldiering--I made no mistake about that. The regularity--shipboard's too regular for me. I've tried it more than once for the sake of getting somewhere, and before the voyage was half over I'd always had more than enough. I knew I should hate it, but I joined up straight and away.... I've lost everything that made life good to me. Other chaps--blind chaps and crippled--might think I'd got off easily. So I have, I daresay; but then it isn't every one whose life was in moving on. Often when I was alone I've shouted and laughed just to feel how my legs moved under me.... It's the devil--this compound--but even if I were out of it, I'm a lame thing. When the war ends I'm a lame thing. Not what most people would call crippled, of course; I can walk a few miles and feed myself, and to look at me you wouldn't know there was anything at all the matter. If I were a townsman it wouldn't make very much difference; if I'd stayed a clerk I could go on being a clerk. But I can't be ... what I was. I've lost everything that made life good to me. What for?

"I can't remember exactly the feeling I had about it when I enlisted--what made me do it. So many things have happened since then. But I know I didn't think about it long; so far as I remember I didn't hesitate, not for a minute. I went straight off the morning after war was declared. Midnight, fourth, we were at war, and midday, fifth, I was a soldier. Must have been some sort of instinct.... Sometimes I tell myself what a blazing fool I am.

"That's sometimes. Other times----"

He was silent for so long that William concluded the flow of his confidence had ceased.

"When you live in a crowd," he said at last, "you can always make excuses for yourself. Most likely you don't need to. If you're a fool or a coward you herd with a lot of other fools and cowards, and you all back each other up. So you never come face to face with yourself."

The idea was new to William, and a year or two ago he would have repelled it because it was new; now he turned his eyes from the horizon, curiously, to the lean brown face at his elbow.

"No?" he said interrogatively.

"If," said the other, "if I had gone back ... it wouldn't have been the same. It couldn't have been.... If you live that way there's two things you can't do without: a good strong body to stand rain and wind and work, and a mind you're not afraid to be alone with. When you're miles from any one, in the woods at night, you want to be good company for yourself. If I'd turned my back on it all, I mightn't have been very good company. I've done plenty of things to set the parsons praying over me if I told 'em; I've been a fool times out of mind and ashamed of it afterwards; but----"

He slid into a silence that lasted until William took up the word; not in answer or argument but irrelevantly, so that he, too, might talk out his heart.

"Do you know what I think I am sometimes? a rat in a trap--or a squirrel spinning round in a cage. Very busy doing nothing.... I'll tell you one of the things I've been doing lately--every word of it truth. I've been typing a long correspondence about a civilian--a worker in one of the religious organizations who came into the town, ten miles by train, to get stores he wanted for his hut. The rule is, civilians mustn't travel by train without a movement order from the A.P.M.; there isn't an A.P.M. in the place he comes from, so he went to the military and got an _ordre de service_. He came all right, but it's irregular--an _ordre de service_ should only be given to a soldier. One of the M.P.'s on duty at the station reported it--and there's been strafing and strafing and strafing. Reams written about it--I've written 'em. Not only about the _ordre de service_ but about who the correspondence is to go through--the A.P.M.'s office or the Base Commandant or some one else. After three or four weeks it was referred to G.H.Q. and some one there wrote to the secretary of the organization asking for an explanation--and naturally he answered the letter. Well, that was irregular too; he oughtn't to have answered because the matter should have been dealt with locally--'gone through the proper channels.' So more correspondence and strafing.... Sheets of paper--reams of it--and they say it's scarce! And in the end, nothing--just nothing. When the wretched people wrote and asked exactly what they were to do--how they were to get a movement order from an A.P.M. when there wasn't an A.P.M. to give it, we wrote back and said, 'This correspondence must now cease.' I ticked it out on my typewriter."

"I believe you," the other nodded, "I've seen something of that sort myself.... And the papers say, 'Your country wants you'!"

"And it goes on," said William, "day after day. I'm always busy--about nothing. 'Attention is directed to G.R.O. 9999. The Return called for in the form shown as the third appendix----'"

"Good Lord," cried the other, "stop it. That's just what maddens me--I don't want to think of it."

William laughed sullenly with his chin resting on his hand.

"I've not much else to think of," he said.

* * * * *

He watched the lean man down the hill till a winding of the road hid him; and then he too rose, in his turn, and went back to the town--to the rat-trap wherein he made war!

*CHAPTER XVIII*

The war was well past its third anniversary when William again met Edith Haynes. The silence once broken between them they had corresponded with a fair regularity, and, leave being due to him, he wrote to ask if he should be likely to meet her in London; receiving in answer a hearty invitation to pass as much of his leave as he could spare--the whole of it if he would--with her mother and herself in Somerset. The reply was an eager acceptance; hitherto his leave, if a respite from the office, had been dreary enough in comparison with the home-comings of other men--it was a suspicion of the loneliness in which it was usually passed that had prompted Edith's invitation. She met him at the station and drove him home, and they picked up their odd friendship at the point where they had left it off.

The only other member of the family with whom he made acquaintance was a delicate, pale mother, given, since her firstborn was killed at Thiepval, to long silences and lonely brooding; a younger son had been a prisoner since the surrender at Kut, and Edith ran her mother as well as the house and the estate. She looked older, and by more than the passing of three years; the iron of war had entered into her soul, for the brother killed in France had been her darling as well as her mother's; but in other ways she was just what William remembered her, a kindly and capable good comrade. The delicate, pale mother kept much to her room, and the pair, in consequence, were left often to each other's company--sometimes tramping the home farm with Edith bent on bailiff's duties, sometimes sitting by the evening fire. For the first day or two he was not communicative--engrossed, perhaps, in mere pleasure in his new surroundings; but even through the stiffness and restraint of his letters she had guessed at something of the change that had come over him, and when he showed signs of emerging from his shell she took pains, on her side, to draw him out and discover his attitude of mind. By degrees, from his silences as much as from his speech, she learned of the weariness that had settled like a mist on his soul, the aimlessness with which he plodded the pathway of his disciplined life. She knew him for a man disillusioned, in whom the imaginings of his pre-soldier days had died as completely as his faith in his pre-war creed. Had the lot fallen to him he would not have shrunk from his turn in the trenches, and at the bottom of his heart, for Griselda's sake, there was always a smoulder of hatred; but he had seen much of the war machine, had realized keenly his own unimportance therein, and he blushed when he remembered that he had once imagined that his one small arm and his private vengeance might be factors, and important factors, in the downfall of the German Empire. And the first mad impulse of agony, the impulse which would have sent him into battle single-handed, had passed as it was bound to pass.

If she suspected him at first of a drift towards his former "pacifism" she soon discovered her mistake; the one rock on which he stood fast was that conviction of error which had come to him in the Forest of Arden. He hated the war as it affected himself, was weary of the war in general; all he longed for was its ending, which meant his release from imprisonment; but neither hatred nor weariness had blinded his eyes to the folly of that other blindness which had denied that war could be. His contempt for his past dreams of a field-marshal's baton was as nothing to his contempt for those further past dreams wherein fact was dispelled by a theory; and he had, in his own words, "no use for" a pacifist party which had never, as he had, made confession of its fundamental error. He was still in his heart a soldier, even though a soldier disillusioned; his weariness of the military machine, his personal grievance against it, were not to be compared to the fiery conversion that had followed on the outbreak of war. The one concerned matters of detail only; the other his fundamental faith.... So much Edith Haynes understood from their intimate fragmentary talks.

One change in himself he had not noticed till Edith, half jestingly, spoke of it: an affection that was almost a tenderness for the actual soil of England. More than once when he walked with her he contrasted the road or the landscape with those grown familiar in France; and the contrast was always in favour of the Somerset hills or the winding Somerset highway. Without ties as he was, without household, without family, she saw that he shrank from the idea of again leaving "home."

"What shall you do when the war is over?" she asked him one evening as his leave neared its end, curious to know how he had planned to spend his arrested life. So far he had spoken of no future beyond the end of the war itself; and when she put to him the question direct he only shook his head vaguely.

"I don't know. It may seem odd to you, but I haven't thought much about it. In fact"--he smiled apologetically--"I don't believe I've really thought at all."

"No, I don't think it odd," she told him. "There are a good many like you--I'm inclined to think that you're only one of the majority. People whose business it is to reorganize industry--I suppose they're thinking ahead. One prays they are. But as for the rest of us ... it's difficult to think ahead because of the way it has broken up our lives and our plans. We've got used to its breaking them up."

"That's it," he nodded back. "We've been made to do things for so long. Taken and made to do them.... Some have been taken and killed and some have been taken and crushed--and some have only been made prisoners, like me. But we've all of us been taken--and bent and twisted into things we never meant to be.... So we don't plan--what's the use? ... I might of course--I'm not like the men in the trenches who may be killed any minute. I'm safe enough where I am--safer than in London; but all the same I don't.... I just wait to see what happens."

* * * * *

For a week before William left England there had been expectation of coming developments at the front, and the papers had spoken of "considerable aerial activity," on the enemy's side as on ours. The developments commenced in earnest on the day of his return from leave; but his first personal experience of the increase in aerial activity was not for a few days later, when, as he was passing through the square in the centre of the town, a gun thudded out--and then another. He stopped and made one of a little knot of khaki that was staring up into the blue, and whereof one of the component parts was a corporal who worked in his office. He himself could see nothing but a drift or two of smoke, but he gathered from the sharper-sighted corporal that there were two Fritz planes overhead, and he stood cricking his neck and blinking upwards in the strong sunlight while passers-by made groups on the pavement and shopkeepers issued from their doors. He had seen the same thing happen before and quite harmlessly; no one around him seemed alarmed or disturbed, and in a few minutes the guns ceased firing as the aeroplanes passed out of range.

"Photographing," said the corporal, as they walked away to the office. "He's been over quite a lot the last week or two, and some time or other I suppose we shall have him in earnest. It's a wonder to me he's left us alone so long; it 'ud be worth his while coming even if he didn't do more than drop a bomb or two on the A.H.T.D., and start a few hundred horses."

"Yes," agreed William, "I suppose it would." He was not in the least alarmed as he settled down to his files; since he joined the Army he had never been exposed to danger, and security had become with him a habit.

* * * * *

That night there was a heavy post, and the office was kept working late; it was close on eleven when William was called upstairs to take down some letters from dictation. The officer who had sent for him was clearing his throat for the first sentence when the door opened for the announcement, "Local aircraft alarm, sir."

"Oh, all right," said the officer resignedly. "Go downstairs, Tully, and come up again when the lights go on. Probably only a false alarm--we had two the other night. Just the sort of thing that would happen when we're behindhand."

He went out grumbling, and William followed him, feeling his way by the banisters, for the electric light was turned off while he was still on the upper landing; other men from all over the warren of a building were descending likewise, and they bumped and jostled each other in the sudden darkness on the stairs. There were jests as they bumped and much creaking of boots--through which, while William was still a flight from the ground floor, came the first rapid thudding of "Archie." On it, a moment later, an unmistakable bomb and the pattering outburst of machine-guns.... William listened curiously; it was his first experience of an air raid, and though the pace of his heart quickened, as yet there was no real fear in him; but a man pressed against him by the descending stream gasped audibly and clawed round William's arm with his fingers. The action was fear made manifest in darkness, and William, instinctively knowing it infectious, repelled it and strove to free his wrist; but the shaking fingers, eloquent of terror, only clung more tightly to their hold.

"What is it?" William snapped. "What's the matter?"

"It's me--Wright," a voice whispered back in jerks. "I can't help it--the Lord knows I try, but I can't. If it was shells I could stand 'em, but----"

A near-by gun beat down his voice but did not stop it--"at Dunkirk. I was buried two hours: two mortal hours before they got me out--and when I was in hospital he came over and bombed us again. He got one right on to us, and I was blown out of bed, and the men at the other end of the ward were in pieces. In pieces, I tell you--beastly bits of flesh----"

William tried to stand it--realizing that the man must cling and gibber to some one as a child clings and wails to its nurse. They had turned into a room on the ground floor--there were no cellars, but it was esteemed the safest place in the building by reason of the comparative absence of glass--and the pair of them stood backs against the wall. When Wright stopped talking--which was not often--William could hear his breath as it came whining through his teeth; and he remembered that the man wore the ribbon of the D.C.M.--a man who had once had nerve and to all appearance was sound, but who had not sufficient hold on himself to keep his terror from his tongue. He spoke of it unceasingly; whenever the sounds without died down William could hear him whispering--now of the night when he was bombed in hospital and now of the building they were in. It was no good as a shelter--would crumble like a house of cards. Nothing was any good but a cellar or trenches--there should have been trenches. And they were so damnably close to the station, and the station was just what those devils were trying to hit. There came a moment when William could bear it no more, and wrenched himself free of the clawing fingers on his sleeve; he dared not feel them longer, lest his heart also melted within him.

His nervousness took the form of a difficulty in keeping still, and he fidgeted about the darkened room; but the room was fairly full, and he could not move far--after a step or two this way and a step or two that, he was brought up by a solid group that stretched from the wall to a table. He came to a standstill on the edge of the group and tried to listen to their talk; forced himself to listen to it--and all the time straining his ears through the murmur for the droning of the Gotha engines. He fought with himself and fought more manfully than he knew; striving to thrust out of his mind Wright's phrase about the "beastly bits of flesh," and to fasten his hearing, to the exclusion of all else, on the voice of a man, his neighbour in the darkness, who had lately seen a German aeroplane brought down, and, having apparently some mechanical knowledge, was describing its points and its engines. They, the engines, were first-rate, he said, waxing technical; but even if he had not been told it, he should have guessed from the fittings of the plane that Jerry was getting a bit scarce in his stock of rubber and leather. What he was using---- Here the windows rattled loudly and drowned him. "That's pretty close," some one commented, and William moved a restless step away. Once it had seemed to him an easy thing to follow Griselda and die; now all the moral strength he possessed went into the effort not to shrink, to be master of his body, to behave decently and endure. That was all that seemed to matter--to be steady and behave decently--so that, for all his fear of instant death, he never turned his thoughts to God.... He had not known how beautiful silence could be till it came almost suddenly, like a flood of clear, cool water; when some one, muttering that it seemed to be over, opened the door and went out into the courtyard, he followed and stood there feeling the silence as something clean, exquisite and grateful. His hands were wet and hot, and he stretched them out to the air; if he had not prayed when he was under the spell of fear, his heart, at his release from it, was filled with something like praise.

"Listen," said a voice in his ear. It was Wright, his face uplifted in the moonlight and disfigured by ugly twitchings. "Listen," he said, "they're coming back." ... William shrank from him irritably, but the man had not spoken particularly to him, and, having spoken, turned swiftly and went back into the house. He had been the first to catch the double-noted drone which as they stood and listened grew nearer.

"That's him, sure enough," another voice agreed. "Coming up in relays. He'll be out to make a night of it--I thought we'd got rid of him too quickly."

A searchlight wheeled and the anti-aircraft spoke on the word; some one cried, "Got 'im," and pointed, and for an instant William had sight of a wicked thing caught in the ray and rushing upwards. Battery and machine-gun gave tongue at the sight, but in a flash the climbing devil had vanished and the searchlight wheeled after it fruitlessly. As they stood and watched it wheeling, a voice called, "Come in, men," and they went back perforce within their walls.

The first attack had lasted not much over half an hour; this time the ordeal by darkness and waiting was longer. William held himself tightly, ashamed of the weakness with which Wright had infected him and keeping it doggedly at bay; he talked when he could think of anything to talk about--odd irrelevant fragments of whatever came into his head, anything to keep himself from listening. At one time he made a conscious and determined effort to turn his talk and his mind with it to something unconnected with air-raids; but always his speech, like that of his companions, came back to the thought of the moment.

"Do you remember," he asked a man beside him, "what a fuss there was about the first Channel flight? I forget the fellow's name--a Frenchman?"

Some one supplied the name, "Bleriot," out of the darkness.

"Yes, Bleriot--that's it.... Queer when you think of it. Nobody had any idea then what it would mean--getting into cellars and hiding in the dark. If they had"--he forced an attempt at a laugh--"they wouldn't have been so pleased."

"No," his neighbour agreed with him jocularly; "they wouldn't have been so pleased. We thought we was all going to flap about like birds--and instead the most of us go scuttling into holes like beetles what the cook's trying to stamp on. That's flying--for them as don't fly."

"Yes," said William, "that's flying." The beetle simile caught his fancy oddly, and he found himself contrasting it with his old idea of a soldier. After all, the beetle-warrior was a new development--it was impossible to think of Napoleonic heroes as beetles. Yet if they were alive they would have to scuttle too--even Murat the magnificent, and Ney, the Red Lion ...

"When the next war comes," his jocular neighbour was continuing, "every man that ain't in the R.F.C. 'ull be crawling at the bottom of a coal-mine. And I don't mind mentioning in confidence that if I saw a coal-mine 'andy I wouldn't mind crawling down it now."

"No," said William, for the sake of speaking, "I don't suppose you would." He was trying to think of something further to say when he felt the man on his other side start perceptibly and stiffen in attention. Something caught at his throat and he could only whisper, "What is it?"

"He's stopping his engine," said the other quietly; and before William had time to ask what he meant the next bomb fell in the courtyard.

* * * * *

There was only one man wholly uninjured--the terror-haunted Wright, who ran out, splashed with other men's blood, took screaming to his heels and collapsed a mile along the road. There he lay till long after the bell of St. Nicholas had rung an "All Clear" to the town--until long after the ambulances telephoned for from the hospitals outside had loaded up in the streets across which cordons had been drawn by military police and French firemen. Men and fragments of men were taken from the ruins, some speedily, some after much search; and among them Private Tully, past terror, but breathing, still alive but only alive.

He spoke but a few times after the explosion had broken him, and the men who lifted him on a stretcher to the ambulance and out of it could see that he suffered not at all; the shifting and handling that was torture to others left his maimed and mauled body unaffected. The injury to the spine that was killing him had bereft him of the power of pain as well as of the power of movement, and in the hospital, where a few minutes' drive from the ruins landed him, he lay quietly alive for a day or two, for the most part dumb and unconscious, but with intervals of sense and lucid speech. Once, in such an interval, he whispered to the nurse that his wife, too, was buried in France; whereby she saw that he knew he was about to die.

Later he asked that some one would write to Edith Haynes, and tried to explain who she was. "No relation--just a lady I know.... I should like her to hear."

The last person he spoke to was a chaplain, a young man making his round of the ward, who, seeing intelligence in the pale blue eyes, bent over the bed to ask if there was anything he wanted. The chaplain had been warned by a sister that here was a hopeless case, and he spoke very gently and bent very low for the answer.

It drifted out faintly in a slow and expressionless whisper.

"No, thank you," said William. "I don't seem to have been much good ... but there comes a time ... when nothing matters."

"Not even," asked the chaplain, feeling his way, "the sense that you have done your duty?"

"Most people do that," said William. "The question is ... if you've been much use when you've done it."

The chaplain, puzzled, said something of infinite mercy and the standard of God not being as the standard of man.

"If you've done your best..." he suggested.

"Most people do that," said William again ... and slid back once more into silence.

* * * * *

He was buried without mourners, save those detailed for the duty; who, none the less, stiffened in salute of his coffin and called him farewell on the bugle. His death, duly entered in the hospital books, was reported to the Casualty Department; and the Graves Registration clerks took note of his burial and filed it for possible inquiries.

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