ay of him that he was middle-aged. That was the real sacrifice that he
had made in the war--he had given to it the last of his youth. And he
had not been aware of this until he had received that letter.

Now that he was aware of it, he rebelled against the sacrifice. He
refused to be robbed. He would not allow himself to become middle-aged.
Why, he hadn't begun to live yet. He'd only been experimenting up to the
point when the war had started. He'd been thirty-one then, a man full of
promise, and now he was dubbed middle-aged. He remembered with
indignation the theory that men of forty ought to be chloroformed to
make room for the younger generation. "But, hang it, one's years have
nothing to do with it," he protested; "in my spirit I belong to the
younger generation." So, to the rumbling accompaniment of the train, he
argued his claims passionately. Had he formed them into a petition he
would have prayed, "God, make me young again." It would have been
because of Terry that he would have prayed.

And yet he was happy--vaguely happy, as any man must be to whom the
right to live has been restored. For the past half decade his horizon,
and that of all the men with whom he had intimately associated, had been
dwarfed by the thought of dying. Throughout that period he had dared to
hope for nothing personal; he had belonged body and soul to unseen
forces which had hurried him without explanation from one hell to
another. He had had to subdue his pride to their authority and to train
his courage to contemplate the shock of annihilation. Now, at the end of
almost five years, the will and the body which had been so ruthlessly
snatched from him, had been as ruthlessly flung back into his own
keeping. All of a sudden, after having been enslaved in every detail,
his will and body were set free and no one cared what became of them.
They could be his playthings; he was allowed to do with them what he
liked. But what did he like? It was a problem. He could so easily spoil
them. When he reminded himself of how easily he could spoil them the
fear of death, which would never again trouble him, was replaced by the
fear of failure. He was furious to find that he was still capable of
fearing. He had so confidently believed that, whatever the past five
years had stolen from him, they had at least brought him the reward of
never again knowing fear of any sort.

That morning by the earliest train he had shaken off the dust of camps
and starte