screaming, or when, as he trod on one of the
uneasy places an arm had stirred and jerked up suddenly through the
handful of earth that covered it, he had no first-hand sense of horror:
he felt rather as if those things were happening not to him but to
someone else, and that, at the most, they were strange and odd, but no
longer horrible. But now, when reinforced by food again and comfortable
beneath his fur cloak he let his mind do what it would, not checking
it, but allowing it its natural internal activity, he found that a mood
transcending any he had known yet was his. So far from these experiences
being terrifying, so far from their being strange and unreal, they
suddenly became intensely real and shone with a splendour that he had
never suspected. Originally he had been pitchforked by his father into
the army, and had left it to seek music. Sense of duty had made it easy
for him to return to it at a time of national peril; but during all the
bitter anxiety of that he had never, as in the light of the perception
that came to him now, as the wind whistled round him in the dim lit
darkness, had a glimpse of the glory of service to his country. Here,
out in this small, evil-smelling cavern, with the whole grim business of
war going on round him, he for the first time fully realised the reality
of it all. He had been in the trenches before, but until now that had
seemed some vague, evil dream, of which he was incredulous. Now in the
darkness the darkness cleared, and the knowledge that this was the very
thing itself, that a couple of hundred yards away were the lines of the
enemy, whose power, for the honour of England and for the freedom of
Europe, had to be broken utterly, filled him with a sense of firm,
indescribable joy. The minor problems which had worried him, the fact
of millions of treasure that might have fed the poor and needy over all
Britain for a score of years, being outpoured in fire and steel, the
fact of thousands of useful and happy lives being sacrificed, of widows
and orphans and childless mothers growing ever a greater company--all
these things, terrible to look at, if you looked at them alone, sank
quietly into their sad appointed places when you looked at the thing
entire. His own case sank there, too; music and life and love for which
he would so rapturously have lived, were covered up now, and at this
moment he would as rapturously have died, if, by his death, he could
have served in his own inf