umber of sentences that had been most effective in these
rehearsals. Mr. Britling scratched his cheek with the end of his pen.
"I'm glad you want to go, Hugh," he said.

"I _don't_ want to go," said Hugh with his hands deep in his pockets. "I
want to go and work with Cardinal. But this job has to be done by every
one. Haven't you been saying as much all day?... It's like turning out
to chase a burglar or suppress a mad dog. It's like necessary
sanitation...."

"You aren't attracted by soldiering?"

"Not a bit. I won't pretend it, Daddy. I think the whole business is a
bore. Germany seems to me now just like some heavy horrible dirty mass
that has fallen across Belgium and France. We've got to shove the stuff
back again. That's all...."

He volunteered some further remarks to his father's silence.

"You know I can't get up a bit of tootle about this business," he said.
"I think killing people or getting killed is a thoroughly nasty
habit.... I expect my share will be just drilling and fatigue duties and
route marches, and loafing here in England...."

"You can't possibly go out for two years," said Mr. Britling, as if he
regretted it.

A slight hesitation appeared in Hugh's eyes. "I suppose not," he said.

"Things ought to be over by then--anyhow," Mr. Britling added, betraying
his real feelings.

"So it's really just helping at the furthest end of the shove," Hugh
endorsed, but still with that touch of reservation in his manner....

The pause had the effect of closing the theoretical side of the
question. "Where do you propose to enlist?" said Mr. Britling, coming
down to practical details.

Section 7

The battle of the Marne passed into the battle of the Aisne, and then
the long lines of the struggle streamed north-westward until the British
were back in Belgium failing to clutch Menin and then defending Ypres.
The elation of September followed the bedazzlement and dismay of August
into the chapter of forgotten moods; and Mr. Britling's sense of the
magnitude, the weight and duration of this war beyond all wars,
increased steadily. The feel of it was less and less a feeling of crisis
and more and more a feeling of new conditions. It wasn't as it had
seemed at first, the end of one human phase and the beginning of
another; it was in itself a phase. It was a new way of living. And still
he could find no real point of contact for himself with it all except
the point of his pen. Only at his writing-desk, a