initesimal degree, the cause he fought for.

The hours went on, whether swiftly or slowly he did not consider.
The wind fell, and for some minutes a heavy shower of rain plumped
vertically into the trench. Once during it a sudden illumination blazed
in the sky, and he saw the pebbles in the wall opposite shining with
the fresh-falling drops. There were a dozen rifle-shots and he saw
the sentry who had just passed brushing the edge of his coat against
Michael's hand, pause, and look out through the spy-hole close by, and
say something to himself. Occasionally he dozed for a little, and woke
again from dreaming of Sylvia, into complete consciousness of where he
was, and of that superb joy that pervaded him. By and by these dozings
grew longer, and the intervals of wakefulness less, and for a couple of
hours before he was roused he slept solidly and dreamlessly.

His spell of duty began before dawn, and he got up to go his rounds,
rather stiff and numb, and his sleep seemed to have wearied rather
than refreshed him. In that hour of early morning, when vitality burns
lowest, and the dying part their hold on life, the thrill that had
possessed him during the earlier hours of the night, had died down. He
knew, having once felt it, that it was there, and believed that it would
come when called upon; but it had drowsed as he slept, and was overlaid
by the sense of the grim, inexorable side of the whole business. A
disconcerting bullet was plugged through a spy-hole the second after
he had passed it; it sounded not angry, but merely business-like, and
Michael found himself thinking that shots "fired in anger," as the
phrase went, were much more likely to go wide than shots fired calmly.
. . . That, in his sleepy brain, did not sound nonsense: it seemed to
contain some great truth, if he could bother to think it out.

But for that, all was quiet again, and he had returned to his dug-out,
just noticing that the dawn was beginning to break, for the clouds
overhead were becoming visible in outline with the light that filtered
through them, and on their thinner margin turning rose-grey, when the
alarm of an attack came down the line. Instantly the huddled, sleeping
bodies that lay at the side of the trench started into being, and in the
moment's pause that followed, Michael found himself fumbling at the butt
of his revolver, which he had drawn out of its case. For that one moment
he heard his heart thumping in his throat, and felt h