ers, a map was to him but a mystic mass of
marks and colours; he had never seen the sea, never a ship; no water
broader than the parish streams; until the war had never met anything
more like a soldier than the constable of the neighbouring village. But
he had once seen a Royal Marine in uniform. What sort of creatures these
Germans were to him--who knows? They were cruel--he had grasped that.
Something noxious, perhaps, like the adders whose backs he broke with
his stick; something dangerous like the chained dog at Shapton Farm; or
the big bull at Vannacombe. When the war first broke out, and they had
called the younger blacksmith (a reservist and noted village marksman)
back to his regiment, the little cowman had smiled and said: "Wait till
regiment gets to front, Fred'll soon shoot 'em up."

But weeks and months went by, and it was always the Germans, the
Germans; Fred had clearly not yet shot them up; and now one and now
another went off from the village, and two from the farm itself; and the
great Fred returned slightly injured for a few weeks' rest, and, full of
whisky from morning till night, made the village ring; and finally went
off again in a mood of manifest reluctance. All this weighed dumbly on
the mind of the little cowman, the more heavily that because of his
inarticulate shyness he could never talk that weight away, nor could
anyone by talk relieve him, no premises of knowledge or vision being
there. From sheer physical contagion he felt the grizzly menace in the
air, and a sense of being left behind when others were going to meet
that menace with their fists, as it were. There was something proud and
sturdy in the little man, even in the look of him, for all that he was
'poor old Tom,' who brought a smile to the lips of all. He was
passionate, too, if rubbed up the wrong way; but it needed the
malevolence and ingenuity of human beings to annoy him--with his beasts
he never lost his temper, so that they had perfect confidence in him. He
resembled indeed herdsmen of the Alps, whom one may see in dumb
communion with their creatures up in those high solitudes; for he too
dwelt in a high solitude cut off from real fellowship with men and women
by lack of knowledge, and by the supercilious pity in them. Living in
such a remote world his talk--when he did say something--had ever the
surprising quality attaching to the thoughts of those by whom the normal
proportions of things are quite unknown. His short squar