h he
was nearly forty, there was still something of the boy in his face,
something frank and curly-headed, gallant and full of steam, and his
small steady grey eyes looked out on life with a sort of combative
humour. He was still in uniform, though they had given him up as a bad
job after keeping him nine months trying to mend a wounded leg which
would never be sound again; and he was now in the War Office in
connection with horses, about which he knew. He did not like it, having
lived too long with all sorts and conditions of men who were neither
English nor official, a combination which he found trying. His life
indeed, just now, bored him to distraction, and he would ten times rather
have been back in France. This was why he found the word "Peace" so
exceptionally tantalising.
Reaching his rooms, he threw off his tunic, to whose stiff regularity he
still had a rooted aversion; and, pulling out a pipe, filled it and sat
down at his window.
Moonshine could not cool the hot town, and it seemed sleeping badly--the
seven million sleepers in their million homes. Sound lingered on, never
quite ceased; the stale odours clung in the narrow street below, though a
little wind was creeping about to sweeten the air. 'Curse the war!' he
thought. 'What wouldn't I give to be sleeping out, instead of in this
damned city!' They who slept in the open, neglecting morality, would
certainly have the best of it tonight, for no more dew was falling than
fell into Jimmy Fort's heart to cool the fret of that ceaseless thought:
'The war! The cursed war!' In the unending rows of little grey houses,
in huge caravanserais, and the mansions of the great, in villas, and high
slum tenements; in the government offices, and factories, and railway
stations where they worked all night; in the long hospitals where they
lay in rows; in the camp prisons of the interned; in bar racks,
work-houses, palaces--no head, sleeping or waking, would be free of that
thought: 'The, cursed war!' A spire caught his eye, rising ghostly over
the roofs. Ah! churches alone, void of the human soul, would be
unconscious! But for the rest, even sleep would not free them! Here a
mother would be whispering the name of her boy; there a merchant would
snore and dream he was drowning, weighted with gold; and a wife would be
turning to stretch out her arms to-no one; and a wounded soldier wake out
of a dream trench with sweat on his brow; and a newsvendor in his garret
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