nd more particularly at
night, were the great presences of the conflict his. Yet he was always
desiring some more personal and physical participation.

Hugh came along one day in October in an ill-fitting uniform, looking
already coarser in fibre and with a nose scorched red by the autumnal
sun. He said the life was rough, but it made him feel extraordinarily
well; perhaps man was made to toil until he dropped asleep from
exhaustion, to fast for ten or twelve hours and then eat like a wolf. He
was acquiring a taste for Woodbine cigarettes, and a heady variety of
mineral waters called Monsters. He feared promotion; he felt he could
never take the high line with other human beings demanded of a corporal.
He was still trying to read a little chemistry and crystallography, but
it didn't "go with the life." In the scanty leisure of a recruit in
training it was more agreeable to lie about and write doggerel verses
and draw caricatures of the men in one's platoon. Invited to choose what
he liked by his family, he demanded a large tuckbox such as he used to
have at school, only "_much_ larger," and a big tin of insect powder.
It must be able to kill ticks....

When he had gone, the craving for a personal share in the nation's
physical exertions became overpowering in Mr. Britling. He wanted, he
felt, to "get his skin into it." He had decided that the volunteer
movement was a hopeless one. The War Office, after a stout resistance to
any volunteer movement at all, decided to recognise it in such a manner
as to make it ridiculous. The volunteers were to have no officers and no
uniforms that could be remotely mistaken for those of the regulars, so
that in the event of an invasion the Germans would be able to tell what
they had to deal with miles away. Wilkins found his conception of a
whole nation, all enrolled, all listed and badged according to capacity,
his dream of every one falling into place in one great voluntary
national effort, treated as the childish dreaming of that most ignorant
of all human types, a "novelist." _Punch_ was delicately funny about
him; he was represented as wearing a preposterous cocked hat of his own
design, designing cocked hats for every one. Wilkins was told to "shut
up" in a multitude of anonymous letters, and publicly and privately to
"leave things to Kitchener." To bellow in loud clear tones "leave things
to Kitchener," and to depart for the theatre or the river or an
automobile tour, was felt ve