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 passersby 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
