ge. He could not lie in peace in his bed; he got
up and prowled about his room, blundering against chairs and tables in
the darkness.... We were too stupid to do the most obvious things; we
were sending all these boys into hardship and pitiless danger; we were
sending them ill-equipped, insufficiently supported, we were sending our
children through the fires to Moloch, because essentially we English
were a world of indolent, pampered, sham good-humoured, old and
middle-aged men. (So he distributed the intolerable load of
self-accusation.) Why was he doing nothing to change things, to get them
better? What was the good of an assumed modesty, an effort at tolerance
for and confidence in these boozy old lawyers, these ranting platform
men, these stiff-witted officers and hide-bound officials? They were
butchering the youth of England. Old men sat out of danger contriving
death for the lads in the trenches. That was the reality of the thing.
"My son!" he cried sharply in the darkness. His sense of our national
deficiencies became tormentingly, fantastically acute. It was as if all
his cherished delusions had fallen from the scheme of things.... What
was the good of making believe that up there they were planning some
great counter-stroke that would end in victory? It was as plain as
daylight that they had neither the power of imagination nor the
collective intelligence even to conceive of a counter-stroke. Any dull
mass may resist, but only imagination can strike. Imagination! To the
end we should not strike. We might strike through the air. We might
strike across the sea. We might strike hard at Gallipoli instead of
dribbling inadequate armies thither as our fathers dribbled men at the
Redan.... But the old men would sit at their tables, replete and sleepy,
and shake their cunning old heads. The press would chatter and make odd
ambiguous sounds like a shipload of monkeys in a storm. The political
harridans would get the wrong men appointed, would attack every possible
leader with scandal and abuse and falsehood....

The spirit and honour and drama had gone out of this war.

Our only hope now was exhaustion. Our only strategy was to barter blood
for blood--trusting that our tank would prove the deeper....

While into this tank stepped Hugh, young and smiling....

The war became a nightmare vision....

Section 9

In the morning Mr. Britling's face was white from his overnight brain
storm, and Hugh's was fresh from wh