He may have drowsed; at least he had a vision, very real and plain, a
vision very different from any dream of Utopia.

It seemed to him that suddenly a mine burst under a great ship at sea,
that men shouted and women sobbed and cowered, and flares played upon
the rain-pitted black waves; and then the picture changed and showed a
battle upon land, and searchlights were flickering through the rain and
shells flashed luridly, and men darkly seen in silhouette against red
flames ran with fixed bayonets and slipped and floundered over the mud,
and at last, shouting thinly through the wind, leapt down into the enemy
trenches....

And then he was alone again staring over a wet black field towards a dim
crest of shapeless trees.

Section 9

Abruptly and shockingly, this malignity of warfare, which had been so
far only a festering cluster of reports and stories and rumours and
suspicions, stretched out its arm into Essex and struck a barb of
grotesque cruelty into the very heart of Mr. Britling. Late one
afternoon came a telegram from Filmington-on-Sea, where Aunt Wilshire
had been recovering her temper in a boarding-house after a round of
visits in Yorkshire and the moorlands. And she had been "very seriously
injured" by an overnight German air raid. It was a raid that had not
been even mentioned in the morning's papers. She had asked to see him.

It was, ran the compressed telegraphic phrase, "advisable to come at
once."

Mrs. Britling helped him pack a bag, and came with him to the station in
order to drive the car back to the Dower House; for the gardener's boy
who had hitherto attended to these small duties had now gone off as an
unskilled labourer to some munition works at Chelmsford. Mr. Britling
sat in the slow train that carried him across country to the junction
for Filmington, and failed altogether to realise what had happened to
the old lady. He had an absurd feeling that it was characteristic of her
to intervene in affairs in this manner. She had always been so tough and
unbent an old lady that until he saw her he could not imagine her as
being really seriously and pitifully hurt....

But he found her in the hospital very much hurt indeed. She had been
smashed in some complicated manner that left the upper part of her body
intact, and lying slantingly upon pillows. Over the horror of bandaged
broken limbs and tormented flesh below sheets and a counterpane were
drawn. Morphia had been injected, he underst